This guide explains how to set up a router for home computer networks. The exact names of configuration settings on a network router vary depending on the model and whether it is wired or wireless. However, this general procedure will guide you through the process for the common kinds of home network equipment.
Difficulty: Average
Time Required: 1 hour
Here's How:

1. Choose a convenient location to begin installing your router such as an open floor space or table. This does not need to be the permanent location of the device. Particularly for wireless routers, you may find it necessary to re-position the unit after installing it as the cables / signals may not reach all areas needed. At the beginning, its better to choose a location where it's easiest to work with the router and worry about final placement later.

2. Plug in the router's electrical power source, then turn on the router by pushing the power button.

3. (Optional) Connect your Internet modem to the router. Most network modems connect via an Ethernet cable but USB connections are becoming increasingly common. The cable plugs into the router jack named "WAN" or "uplink" or "Internet." After connecting the cable, be sure to power cycle (turn off and turn back on) the modem to ensure the router recognizes it.

4. Connect one computer to the router. Even if the router is a wireless model, connect this first computer to the router via a network cable. Using a cable during router installation ensures the maximum reliability of the equipment. Once a wireless router installation is complete, the computer can be changed over to a wireless connection if desired.

5. Open the router's administration tool. From the computer connected to the router, first open your Web browser. Then enter the router's address for network administration in the Web address field and hit return to reach the router's home page.

Many routers are reached by either the Web address "http://192.168.1.1" or "http://192.168.0.1" Consult your router's documentation to determine the exact address for your model. Note that you do not need a working Internet connection for this step.

6. Log in to the router. The router's home page will ask you for a username and password. Both are provided in the router's documentation. You should change the router's password for security reasons, but do this after the installation is complete to avoid unnecessary complications during the basic setup.

7. If you want your router to connect to the Internet, you must enter Internet connection information into that section of the router's configuration (exact location varies). If using DSL Internet, you may need to enter the PPPoE username and password. Likewise, if you have been issued a static IP address by your provider (you would need to have requested it), the static IP fields (including network mask and gateway) given to you by the provider must also must be set in the router.

8. If you were using a primary computer or an older network router to connect to the Internet, your provider may require you to update the MAC address of the router with the MAC address of the device you were using previously. Read How to Change a MAC Address for a detailed description of this process.

9. If this is a wireless router, change the network name (often called SSID). While the router comes to you with a network name set at the factory, you will never want to use this name on your network. Read How to Change the Router SSID for detailed instructions.

10. Verify the network connection is working between your one computer and the router. To do this, you must confirmed that the computer has received IP address information from the router. See How to Find IP Addresses for a description of this process.

11. (If applicable) Verify your one computer can connect to the Internet properly. Open your Web browser and visit a few Internet sites such as http://compnetworking.about.com/.

12. Connect additional computers to the router as needed. If connecting wirelessly, ensure the network name (SSID) of each is computer matches that of the router.

13. Finally, configure additional network security features as desired to guard your systems against Internet attackers. These WiFi Home Network Security Tips offer a good checklist to follow.

Tips:

1. When connecting devices with network cables, be sure each end of the cable connects tightly. Loose cables are one of the most common sources of network setup problems.

What You Need:

* A network router (wireless or wired)
* Network adapters installed on all devices to be connected to the router
* A working Internet modem (optional)
* A Web browser installed at least one computer in the network

SQL Server 2005 Installation

Installation process

Installing Windows XP can take up to two hours. To make the process more manageable, it has been broken up into several sections. When you are ready, install Windows XP:

Exchange Server 2003

Exchange Server 2003 (v6.5) debuted on September 28, 2003. Exchange Server 2003 (currently at Service Pack 2) can be run on Windows 2000 Server (only if Service Pack 4 is first installed) and 32-bit Windows Server 2003, although some new features only work with the latter. Like Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003 has many compatibility modes to allow users to slowly migrate to the new system. This is useful in large companies with distributed Exchange Server environments who cannot afford the downtime and expense that comes with a complete migration.

One of the new features in Exchange Server 2003 is enhanced disaster recovery which allows administrators to bring the server online quicker. This is done by allowing the server to send and receive mail while the message stores are being recovered from backup. Some features previously available in the Microsoft Mobile Information Server 2001/2002 products have been added to the core Exchange Server product, like Outlook Mobile Access and server-side ActiveSync, while the Mobile Information Server product itself has been dropped. Better anti-virus and anti-spam protection have also been added, both by providing built-in APIs that facilitate filtering software and built-in support for the basic methods of originating IP address, SPF ("Sender ID"), and DNSBL filtering which were standard on other open source and *nix-based mail servers. Also new is the ability to drop inbound e-mail before being fully processed, thus preventing delays in the message routing system. There are also improved message and mailbox management tools, which allow administrators to execute common chores more quickly. Others, such as Instant Messaging and Exchange Conferencing Server have been extracted completely in order to form separate products. Microsoft now appears to be positioning a combination of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Live Communications Server, Live Meeting and Sharepoint as its collaboration software of choice. Exchange Server is now to be simply e-mail and calendaring.

Editions

Exchange Server 2003 is available in two versions, Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. Standard Edition supports one message database per server, and supports databases up to 16 GB in size. Beginning with the release of Service Pack 2, Standard Edition allows a maximum database size of 75 GB, but only supports 18 GB by default; larger sized databases have to be updated-in with a registrychange.^[3] Enterprise Edition allows a 16 TB maximum database size, and supports up to 4 storage groups with 5 databases per storage group for a total of 20 databases per server.^[4]

Exchange Server 2003 is included with both Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 Standard and Premium editions and is 32-bit only, and will not install on the various 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003.

Clients

Microsoft Exchange Server uses a proprietary RPC protocol, MAPI/RPC, documented here: [1]. It was designed to be used by theMicrosoft Outlook client. Clients capable of using the advanced features of Exchange Server include Microsoft Outlook, Novell Evolution, and the latest version of Microsoft Entourage for Mac.

E-mail hosted on an Exchange Server can also be accessed using POP3 and IMAP4 protocols, using clients such as Outlook Express,Mozilla Thunderbird, and Lotus Notes. (These protocols must be enabled on the server. Recent versions of Exchange Server turn them off by default.)

Exchange Server mailboxes can also be accessed through a web browser, using Outlook Web Access (OWA). Exchange Server 2003 also featured a version of OWA for mobile devices, called Outlook Mobile Access (OMA).

Coupled with Windows Mobile 5.0 AKU2 or higher, Exchange Server 2003 SP2 supports pushing e-mail to mobile devices—similar to the operation of BlackBerry devices or iPhone.^[5][6]

Unlike Exchange Server 2000, Exchange Server 2003 no longer ships instant messaging for internal corporate systems. Microsoft releasedLive Communication Server to provide those services as a standalone program.

Exchange 2003 Anti-Spam Filtering

Exchange Server 2003 added several basic filtering methods to Exchange Server. They are not sophisticated enough to eliminate spam, but they can protect against DoS and mailbox flooding attacks. Exchange Server 2000 supported the ability to block a sender's address, or e-mail domain by adding '*@domain.com', which is still supported in Exchange Server 2003. Added filtering methods in Exchange Server 2003 are:

Connection filtering

Messages are blocked from DNS RBL lists^[7] or from manually specified IP addresses/ranges

Recipient filtering

Messages blocked when sent to manually specified recipients on the server (for intranet-only addresses) or to any recipients not on the server (stopping spammers from guessing addresses)

Sender ID filtering

Sender ID, a form of Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

Intelligent Message Filter

A free Microsoft add-on that uses heuristic message analysis to block messages or direct them to the "Junk E-Mail" folder in Microsoft Outlook clients.^[8]

Exchange Server 2007

Exchange Server 2007 was released in late 2006 to business customers as part of Microsoft's roll-out wave of new products. It includes new clustering options, 64-bit support for greater scalability, voice mail integration, better search and support for Web services, better filtering options, and a new Outlook Web Access interface. Exchange 2007 also dropped support for Exchange 5.50 migrations, routing groups, admin groups, Outlook Mobile Access, X.400, and some API interfaces, amongst other features.^[9]

Exchange Server 2007 (v8 or with SP1 v8.1) runs on 64-bit x86-64 versions of Windows Server only. This requirement applies to supported production environments only; a 32-bit trial version is available for download and testing. However, companies currently running Exchange Server on 32-bit hardware will be required to replace or migrate hardware if they wish to upgrade to the new version. Companies that are currently running Exchange Server on 64-bit capable hardware are still required to migrate from their existing Exchange 2000/2003 servers to a new 2007 server since in-place upgrades are not supported in 2007.

The first beta of Exchange Server 2007 (then named "Exchange 12" or E12) was released in December 2005 to a very limited number of beta testers. A wider beta was made available via TechNet Plus and MSDN subscriptions in March 2006 according to the Microsoft Exchange team blog.^{[citation needed]} On April 25, 2006, Microsoft announced that the next version of Exchange Server would be calledExchange Server 2007.

Exchange Server 2007 is an integrated part of the Innovative Communications Alliance products.^[10]

Key improvements

The principal enhancements, as outlined by Microsoft, are:^[11]

• Protection: anti-spam, antivirus, compliance, clustering with data replication, improved security and encryption


• Improved Information Worker Access: improved calendaring, unified messaging, improved mobility, improved web access


• Improved IT Experience: 64-bit performance & scalability, command-line shell & simplified GUI, improved deployment, role separation, simplified routing


• Exchange Management Shell: a new command-line shell and scripting language for system administration (based on Windows PowerShell). Shell users can perform every task that can be performed in the Exchange Server graphical user interface plus additional tasks, and can program often-used or complex tasks into scripts that can be saved, shared, and re-used. The Exchange Management Shell has over 375 unique commands to manage features of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.^[12]


• "Unified Messaging" that lets users receive voice mail, e-mail, and faxes in their mailboxes, and lets them access their mailboxes from cell phones and other wireless devices. Voice commands can be given to control and listen to e-mail over the phone (and also send some basic messages, like "I'll be late")


• Increased the database maximum size limit. Database size is now limited to 16Tb per database.


• Increased the maximum number of storage groups and mail databases per server, to 5 each for Standard Edition (from 1 each in Exchange Server 2003 Standard), and to 50 each for Enterprise Edition (from 4 groups and 20 databases in Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise).

Clustering and high availability

Exchange Server Enterprise Edition supports clustering of up to 4 nodes when using Windows 2000 Server, and up to 8 nodes with Windows Server 2003. Exchange Server 2003 also introduced active-active clustering, but for two-node clusters only. In this setup, both servers in the cluster are allowed to be active simultaneously. This is opposed to Exchange's more common active-passive mode in which the failover servers in any cluster node cannot be used at all while their corresponding home servers are active. They must wait, inactive, for the home servers in the node to fail. Subsequent performance issues with active-active mode have led Microsoft to recommend that it should no longer be used.^[13] In fact, support for active-active mode clustering has been discontinued with Exchange Server 2007.

Exchange's clustering (active-active or active-passive mode) has been criticised because of its requirement for servers in the cluster nodes to share the same physical data. The clustering in Exchange Server provides redundancy for Exchange Server as an application, but not for Exchange data.^[14] In this scenario, the data can be regarded as a single point of failure, despite Microsoft's description of this set up as a "Shared Nothing" model.^[15] This void has however been filled by ISV's and storage manufacturers, through "site resilience" solutions, such as geo-clustering and asynchronous data replication.^[16] Exchange Server 2007 introduces new cluster terminology and configurations that address the shortcomings of the previous "shared data model".^[17]

Exchange Server 2007 provides built-in support for asynchronous replication modeled on SQL Server's "Log Shipping"^[18] in CCR (Cluster Continuous Replication)^[19] clusters, which are built on MSCS MNS (Microsoft Cluster Service—Majority Node Set) clusters, which do not require shared storage. This type of cluster can be inexpensive and deployed in one, or "stretched" across two datacenters for protection against site-wide failures such as natural disasters. The limitation of CCR clusters is the ability to have only two nodes and the third node known as "voter node" or file share witness^[20] that prevents "split brain"^[20] scenarios, generally hosted as a file share on a Hub Transport Server.^[21] The second type of cluster is the traditional clustering that was available in previous versions, and is now being referred to as SCC (Single Copy Cluster). In Exchange Server 2007 deployment of both CCR and SCC clusters has been simplified and improved; the entire cluster install process takes place during Exchange Server installation. LCR or Local Continuous Replication^[21] has been referred to as the "poor man's cluster". It is designed to allow for data replication to an alternative drive attached to the same system and is intended to provide protection against local storage failures. It does not protect against the case where the server itself fails.

In November 2007, Microsoft released SP1 for Exchange Server 2007. This service pack includes an additional high-availability feature called SCR (Standby Continuous Replication). Unlike CCR which requires that both servers belong to a Windows cluster, typically residing in the same datacenter, SCR can replicate data to a non-clustered server, located in a separate datacenter.

Licensing

Like Windows Server products, Exchange Server requires Client Access Licenses, which are different from Windows CALs. Corporate license agreements, such as the Enterprise Agreement, or EA, include Exchange Server CALs. It also comes as part of the Core CAL. Just like Windows Server and other server products from Microsoft, you can choose to use User or Device CALs. Device CALs are assigned to a device (workstation, laptop or PDA). User CALs, are assigned to a user or employee (not a mailbox). User CALs allow a user to access Exchange e-mail from any device. User and Device CALs are the same price, however cannot be used interchangeably. For Service Providers looking to host Microsoft Exchange, there is an SPLA (Service Provider License Agreement) available whereby Microsoft receives a monthly service fee in the place of the traditional Client Access Licenses. Two types of Exchange CAL are available: Exchange CAL Standard and Exchange CAL Enterprise. The Enterprise CAL is an add-on licence to the Standard CAL