Discovr 1: Networking
Posted on May 8, 2008 | 9 comments
Discovr Hosts: Michael Mistretta and Chris Thomson
Special Guest: Josh Holloway
Intro music by Joe Sayer (email)
Have you ever wondered about what happens when your computer joins a network? Learn all about networks, DHCP, IP addresses, subnet masks and everything you need to know to set up the ultimate home network on the inaugural episode of the Discovr podcast.
We geek out on the first episode of Discovr talking all about networks of every kind.
Shownotes
- Internal and External IP addresses
- Map of the Internet with IP Blocks
- DHCP and DHCP Reservations
- How to find your MAC address
- Hardware and Software Firewalls
- What on earth is SSH?!?
- Hamatchi - VPN for home users
- TCP vs UDP ports
- Subnet Masks
- Interference Robustness
- OpenDNS as an alternative DNS server
- Default IPs for brand-name routers
We’d love to hear your feedback on the first episode of Discovr. Feel free to contact us with any tips, tricks, or topics you want to learn about. You can also follow @Discovr on twitter to keep up with all that’s happening behind the scenes on the Discovr podcast.
Thanks to Joe Sayer for the Discovr jingle, Ben Feldman for the hosting, James Bayliss for our beautiful subscribe buttons, and Josh Holloway for being on the show.
Really nice website Michael!
Very useful introduction to networking for your average joe, not exactly in-depth, but does a great job nonetheless. They cover the details of setting up a decent home network that offers the most flexibility.
Not finished yet, it’s a tad long, but I’ll put some follow up comments when I’m done.
Good job, you’ve made it to my iTunes subscriptions.
Quick note about DHCP leases in, well, pretty much any situation. You’ve always got a gateway device to which all internal devices “report” - and in the example you gave, it would keep for itself the address 192.168.0.1 and start leasing at .2
Think of your hotel analogy - leasing .1 would be like the hotel clerk giving you his counter in the lobby as your room for the night.
Anyway, pretty good stuff. It’s a long listen, but informative for the beginners out there.
Congrats guys!
Great first episode, really enjoyed it
Yup JPDyson, that’s correct. We failed to make that clear on the show. Sorry about that.
Although I wasn’t able to finish listening to the episode (I stopped in the middle of the discussion about DHCP leases), I was very impressed at the technical depth that Josh went into. I’m sure that Discovr will continue on very successfully.
One topic you may want to talk about on the show is podcasting itself. Many people:
Don’t know what podcasting really is (from a consumer viewpoint)
Want to learn how to produce a podcast (just the basics)
Already have a podcast, but don’t know how their shows can be technically improved (in regard to the actual recording of their shows)
Listening now (up to the discussion of DHCP leases)… so far it’s great.
I ‘reserve’ IP addresses by entering an address in the same address block but just outside of the DHCP range. For example, I have my DHCP range set for 192.168.1.100-192.168.1.250. For the machines I want to use a reserved address, I use something like 192.168.1.50, 192.168.1.60, etc. I only reserve addresses for my servers. Every router I’ve used will work with those addresses.
I found that router based DHCP reservations don’t seem to work reliably on some of the routers I’ve used (especially D-Link & Netgear). I haven’t tried it on my Linksys WRT54G or Airport Extreme, though.
Mike: I’ve been using it on my Time Capsule/Airport Extreme for awhile and haven’t had any problems with them - as of yet.
One of the things I really liked from the show was the use of Mac Networking Locations. I haven’t really found a use for them before now, but I can see the appeal for someone that is constantly lugging their Mac around to different locations.
Great show. I learned a lot from it.
Can’t wait for episode two.