This is a physical diagram of our home communications network. For the voice side of things, I have a Norstar Compact ICS hybrid key system with 10 or so digital display phones plus a flash voice mail system. My incoming lines are equipped with Call Waiting and Caller ID service.
The whole system works really well. We use the hold, paging (to one or all telephones), Caller ID (to all
telephones) and last number redial features. I use the Flash voice mail to provide 2 voice mail boxes - one
for general use and one for the home office. Think this is good? The best is yet to come...
On the data side of things, the computing network consists of a few PCs connected to a Cisco / Linksys 54 Mbits/sec wireless G router / switch
combo plus a laptop PC that connects in wireless mode.
As I use 3 Meg bits / sec DSL for the Internet service and required more than 2 IP addresses, I had a bit of a problem. But not for long.
The fix for this was to use NAT and a private IP addressing scheme. The router performs DHCP (giving us up to 254 private IP addresses) and firewall functions. The Router uses only one public Internet IP address. By using NAT, all of the PC's are effectively invisible when on the 'net. What more could you want?
I use the TCP/IP protocol on our LAN and use the Layer 2 tunneling protcol and IPSec (secure IP) for occasional work at home applications. The ability to tunnel across to the LAN at work is really neat because when I log into my lap top PC, everything appears as it does at work - email, intranet and all. Cool or what? Wait, it gets better. None of the other PCs can access my work stuff so, it remains safe and secure.
Besides Internet browsing access, we use our LAN for other applications such as games, MSN and Yahoo messenger, Peer-to-peer file sharing, e-mail, hard drive backups, shared printing, remote administration and tons of other neat stuff.
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