The struggle for personal networking
If you have more than one device in your home sooner or later you will want to share files between them. Maybe you want to make a photo album on your laptop but the downloaded photos are on your desktop, or you start writing an article on your tablet and want to finish it on your desktop, you will need access to the same file from different places. You will need a network.
But usually a network is already in place in your home even if you don’t think about it or you don’t realize it yet: if you have an internet connection, your ISP will install a router in your home and all your devices that connect to the internet will do so by connecting to the router. Without much fanfare, by connecting all to the same router, all the devices in your home are also connected to each other. Your home has quietly and suddenly become the residence of a computer network.
The following articles will deal with this situation, the personal network that you have in your home and also the many ways in which you share files from one device to another. Of course today there is also a competing network, “the cloud” and we will also cover aspects of it. In fact, we will start with it since it is the most usual way of sharing files and work today. So here is the list of articles that will follow. For now it’s just a list, but each point will become a link to the actual article as I write it:
- Eliminate the network altogether: using the cloud
- Initial concerns: switching to a professional NAS
- Further flexibility: building a Raspberry PI home server
- The Linux-only network: sharing files with NFS
- The expansion: adding more services to your network
- The gates: accessing your home network from the Internet
- Thoughts on NFS file sharing
As you see we are tackling sharing the easy way, the not so easy way and the downright insane way. But don’t worry, I will fully justify each step, argue for it and try to explain it as simple as possible. It is also the personal journey I took, exactly in this order, in trying to conquer the problem of sharing between all the many devices in my own home.
Networking is essential today and your home network is not obsolete, even though Google, Microsoft and many other are desperately trying to make it seem that way. Hopefully these articles will be of use to you and as always, for any extra detail, explanation or curiosity, don’t hesitate to ask. The articles are not final and will be updated if I learn more or if there is interest in other aspects that I don’t yet cover. Stay tuned.
