Network Startup Kit
INTRODUCTION

Purpose

The Internet is loosely defined as an interconnection of many individual TCP/IP based networks from educational and research institutions, government branches and commercial organizations for the purpose of sharing and exchanging information in an open fashion, The purpose of this Guide is to provide the necessary instructions and software (on diskettes) to install a local area network (LAN) for Mac's and PC's and access the Internet at a minimal cost.

The Limitations

Network

Although there are many varieties of local area network topologies - Bus, Star, Ring, etc. (please see Appendix G), and transmission media - coaxial cable, unshielded twisted pair, microwaves and wireless radio, we shall only consider the "traditional" cable-based Ethernet that conforms to the IEEE 802.3 standards. The cable-based Ethernet was selected since it is mature, inexpensive, easy to install and flexible enough to be integrated into high-speed fiber-optic networks such as FDDI with off-the-shelf, ready for plug-and-play technologies (see Figure A).

This Beginner's Guide aims at installing LANs for less than 100 stations with the "average" traffic loads resulting from a few hours of remote logins daily and occasional transfer of files. The network can start small with a couple of PCs and later expand. However, we do not address the design and installation of large networks of hundreds or thousands of stations, since such tasks should be conducted by network professionals who are qualified to study the projected traffic loads along with network management considerations.

It is possible to hook up existing non-TCP/IP networks to the Internet via multiprotocol routers, but this is beyond the scope of this Guide.

Systems

The computer systems to be considered for networking here are IBM or compatible 386 PCs (personal computers running MS-DOS version 5.0 or greater or Windows version 3.1 or 3.11 from Microsoft) with a minimum of 8 MB of memory and MACs (Macintosh's running System 7 or later, from Apple Computer).

Software

The Internet requires that network software for all access stations conform to the TCP/IP protocol specifications. The TCP/IP protocol suite is a set of rules that dictates how a message can be transmitted reliably by breaking the message into units (called packets) of data which are sent through the network to their destination and then reassembled. We have included PC and MAC versions of a public domain TCP/IP software package from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or "NCSA", and several Shareware or Freeware applications for Microsoft Windows. Although the software on the provided diskettes comes from the public domain, and is intended for private use, it has specified copyright owners. Therefore, you should read all copyright notices included in the software before use.

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