Since
reluctantly graduating from childhood into the real world, I’m
often reminded of the value of my home economics classes. The
skills I developed in ironing, sewing and cooking – albeit,
fairly minimal in scope – have come in handy for various chores
across the Sirota homestead. However, I’ve also recognized a
gaping hole in my home ec repertoire. Educated in the era before
the Internet became a household appliance, I’ve spent a sizable
chunk of adulthood educationally unarmed in the battle to become
an adequate home network administrator – or, as we call it, a
Dadmin.
As those of us amateur IT experts who have been slogging through
crawlspaces and tweaking network preferences well know, this is
a dirty, tedious and complex job – but alas, in every
Internet-embracing house, someone has to do it. Indeed, if
someone doesn’t do it, you not only lose out on some of the key
benefits of the information age, but your family’s increasingly
computer-dependent life can quickly become a nightmare of
indecipherable error messages and blue screens of death. Even in
your home is ensconced in the seemingly safe and simplified
Apple bubble, without a network expert, the bubble will
inevitably be popped by ever-spinning rainbow pinwheels.
Unfortunately, many – if not most – high school home economics
curricula still do not teach home networking. For some, that’s
not a problem – thanks to the ubiquity of video games, cell
phones and computers, many kids learn basic tech skills through
osmosis. However, as anyone who has dared venture into a
router’s control panel can attest, there’s a big difference
between knowing how to set up an iPhone or an Xbox, and knowing
how to rig a whole home for secure trouble-free connectivity.
Hence, without this kind of basic education added to home
economics, it’s possible the so-called “digital divide” will
persist – or even widen – in future years. Just as bad, the
stress of trying to self-educate one’s way to connectivity will
increase – and that stress is real. After all, if and when the
household’s designated IT expert fails to deliver a frictionless
high-speed Internet connection, that person tends to face
unrelenting ire and complaints (sidenote: experiencing this
pestering firsthand should automatically make one more
sympathetic to everyone working in the IT/tech support field!).
Of course, because it involves school board votes, funding and
new teacher training, making home networking a universal part of
home economics will take a while (if it ever even happens). In
the meantime, then, here are four nuggets of knowledge I’ve
stumbled into in my clumsy process of self-education – nuggets
that you’d probably discover yourself, but only after hours of
wasted time and agita. I have no doubt true IT professionals
will pick these suggestions apart as either primitive or
imperfect, but my experience is that they both work and keep the
gruntwork/stress-to-network-success ratio pretty manageable for
us amateur Dadmins, Mom-admins and Kid-admins.
1. Get as much off wifi and onto hardwiring as possible: Wifi is
terrific when you are out and about because, typically when you
are away from home base, you aren’t planning major downloading
or uploading. Most often, you save that kind of heavy lifting
for projects (photo editing/uploading) or experiences (HD
streaming movies) anchored in your Bat Cave. But here’s the
thing: wifi is inherently way slower and less reliable than an
ethernet connection, even if you are wifi-ing into the same
source Internet connection. My suggestion: keep wifi available
in the house when you can for family members who still want
mobile connectivity inside the house, but encourage everyone to
do their serious work in a stationary location where they can
plug into a hardwired connection. You’ll face a lot less family
griping about speed, even when everyone is online using the
Internet.
2. Meet your new best friend, the powerline adapter: I know what
you are thinking – you’re thinking sure, a hardline connection
for everyone and every stationary device in the house would be
great, but that’s not physically feasible, unless I either
engage in a daunting DIY project (stringing ethernet cable
through walls, ceilings and crawlspaces) or shell out some
significant moolah for an electrician. Yeah, that’s exactly what
I thought when my Apple TV was crapping out on our house’s wifi
signal. But then I discovered a device so simple and
mind-bogglingly effective, I’ve come to see its not merely as a
form of technology, but as definitive proof that Gandalfian
magic is actually real. This divine talisman is called the
powerline adapter. Basically, it converts your home’s electrical
system into an ethernet connection, without disturbing the
system’s function as a conduit of electricity. Plug one
powerline adapter into a socket near the source of your Internet
connection, then plug powerline adapters into sockets where your
computers are, and voila – you have high-speed hardline
connections without having to add additional wiring.
3. Don’t extend – instead, bridge: For various reasons, many
structures prevent one wifi signal from reaching the entire
home. The oft-used method to address this is the wifi-to-wifi
fix – in the Apple world, you get an Airport Express, plug it in
at a midpoint between the original wifi signal and the part of
the house with the weak signal, and set it to “extended
network,” thereby having its wifi signal relay its traffic to
the original wifi signal. But, then, that compounds the original
problem of wifi’s relative slowness. Sure, the “extend network”
solution does technically work – but trust me, you’re going to
get complaints about speed. So instead, take one of your new
powerline adapters, and plug it ethernet hardwire it into your
Airport Express (or other router), set that router to “bridge”
mode and then give it the same name and password as your
original network. Suddenly, you’ve extended your network, but
with a super-fast connection. Instead of wifi-to-wifi, you’re
doing wifi-to-hardline – which significantly pumps up the speed.
4. The Three-Backup Rule: As your home’s IT director, you will
likely be held responsible for lost family members’ lost data –
or, at absolute minimum, the process of recovering that data
will become your job, with all the stress that such a process
can involve (think: frantic, hysterical family member begging
you to find a report said family member has been working on for
a year but somehow deleted). But the operative word is “can,”
because it doesn’t have to be stressful if you take your IT job
seriously, and by seriously, I mean honoring the Three Backup
Rule. That rule is simple: because hard drives can crap out at
any moment, when possible, you want every user to have three
copies of all personal files you cannot otherwise replace. The
theory is based on the notion that while one hard drive can fail
at any moment, and while one particular backup format (Time
Machine, etc.) can get corrupted, it’s highly unlikely that such
mishaps would happen simultaneously in triplicate.
Now sure, three backups may sound like a daunting task, but it’s
pretty easy to implement. Everyone automatically has one copy of
their data on their device’s drive, and it’s simple enough to
install a backup program on each device to run periodically in
the background. So that’s two down, one to go. The only
additional step, then, is a periodic manual backup, and that’s
easy, too. Hard drive space is pretty cheap now – so buy a
massive multi-terabyte hard drive, and every month or every
quarter, plug it into your home’s computers, and just drag over
the respective folders with the users personal files. Then put
that hard drive in a safe (preferably fire and flood proof)
place. |
