Build a Network with an Orange Livebox

Setting up a basic 2-3 PC wireless home network that has shared resources can often involve a reasonable amount of monetary outlay and a lot of frustration. However if you have an Orange Livebox or (Wanadoo) then you have all of the equipment you need. There are many forum posts on the Web asking what equipment is needed to enable a network with a Livebox, but no router or print switch required; the solution is very simple.

So I wanted to make a wireless network (using Windows XP) that had a desktop PC as the main unit and 2 laptops that all shared a printer and external hard drive.

Overview

As I was doing some more research via Google I came across this article from a couple of years ago: How to Network your Livebox, It can be done that explained it in simple terms.

The Livebox is actually a router in itself, and will allow 6 PC’s to share the wireless Internet connection. On this very same network you can also share other resources like the printer, hard drive and just about anything else.

Tweaks

I followed the steps explained and just had to make a few small adjustments:

1.    I had to drag and drop the whole external hard drive volume into ‘My Shared Docs’ folder. Doing this makes it accessible to the network.

2.    One of the laptops was running Vista. So I changed the workgroup name on this machine to ‘MSHOME’ which is the default setting for XP. The default for Vista is ‘WORKGROUP’.

3.    I had Norton Internet Security running, but I just put the network into the ‘Trusted Zone’ in the setting panel.

Now I had a fully functioning wireless network with shared resources and it took 15 mins to enable and cost me nothing. Bargain.