If you work in a large corporation,
you probably have a data center, and that data center
has many racks of equipment.
You have routers and switches and firewalls and intrusion
prevention systems and many other components that make up
your networking infrastructure.
But if you're in a small office, home office, that's a SOHO,
you don't have room for all of these devices.
And a lot of this functionality can be collapsed down
into one single device, and that would be the SOHO router.
This is the SOHO router that I use for my studio,
and you can see it's a single device.
But there's a lot of functionality inside
of this one device.
It connects to my Comcast cable modem network.
There's connectivity on the back for Ethernet.
There's also connectivity on the back for telephones.
All of these interfaces on the back are switched.
There's a firewall inside of this.
There's a wireless access point.
And so a lot of functions are inside
of this single all-in-one device.
Your SOHO router is going to have routing functionality that
connects the outside world-- usually,
over a DSL connection or a cable modem connection.
And this is what's going to allow you
to route between your internal private network
and the external internet network.
SOHO routers also very commonly have a switch built in to them.
This one has four individual interfaces.
It's a single VLAN, and you have four devices that you can
plug in with an Ethernet cable.
One of the advantages behind the design of these SOHO routers
is there's not a lot to configure.
This is automatically going to perform
network address translation between your WAN ports
and your LAN ports.
And that network address translation
is all configured automatically.
You simply need to plug in the connections, power
up the router, and you'll have connectivity to the internet.
Many SOHO routers also include wireless access point
functionality, along with the switching, and the routing
that it's already doing.
And of course, you can configure many aspects
of that wireless configuration.
One of those is that you can configure which
frequencies you'd like to use.
You can, of course, configure which
bands you'd like to communicate on, whether it's 2.4 GHz and/or
5 GHz.
You can also define the SSID name you'd like to use.
This would be the name of the wireless network that
appears in the list of available networks when you connect.
You get to choose the security mode over the wireless network,
which is how the data will be protected
as it goes through the air.
Normally, the WPA2 encryption is a good choice.
And many wireless routers allow you to set a shared key
that everyone will use, or you can configure an enterprise
configuration where every user will put in their own user
name and password to gain access to the wireless network.
And finally, you can decide what channel or set of channels
you would like to use for this particular access
point to provide that connectivity
for your wireless devices.
Both the wide area network connection
and your local area connections on that SOHO router
need to have IP addresses assigned to them.
When you first connect the wide area network connection,
you'll usually get the IP address assigned automatically
through DHCP directly from your internet service provider.
Some service providers also require
that you add authentication into the router's configuration
before it's able to be used on the network.
For the inside of the network, the SOHO router
is usually a DHCP server itself.
So you'll simply plug in any device into the SOHO router,
and it will automatically get an internal IP address.
These IP addresses are defined on the SOHO router itself.
My internal studio addresses, for example,
have a 10.1.10.0 network.
You can see the dot one is my gateway address,
then I have a DHCP range that starts at dot two
and ends at dot 50.
So anytime I plug in a device to my network,
my SOHO router's automatically going
to sign an IP address from that available pool.
DNS servers are also important to have in your configuration.
These are passed to the clients during the DHCP process.
If you leave these blank on my router,
it uses the same DNS configuration
that's on the wide area network connection.
If you have your own internal DNS servers
or you would like to use other DNS configurations,
you can add them into the configuration here.
If you're plugging a wired Ethernet device
into the back of your SOHO router,
it's probably set to auto-negotiate its speed
and duplex.
But of course, you can configure those manually on the devices
that you're connecting.
Usually, it's going to automatically define
what speed you'll be using, whether it's 10, 100,
or 1000 megabits per second, and it
will decide what duplex it needs to configure--
either half duplex or preferably full duplex.
If you're connecting a device over the wireless network,
then, obviously, you'll need to enable or disable
that wireless adapter.
And then usually your wireless network
needs to be selected from a list.
And you'll need to provide a password to gain access.
Different operating systems have different ways
to set these configurations, but the names
of these different options should
be similar across different operating systems.
For example, in Mac OS, you can see
there's an option to configure IP version 4,
either automatically using DHCP, or you have an option
to choose manual.
And then you can add the IP addresses
into your configuration by hand.
The easiest configuration though, is to use DHCP--
so the IP address, subnet mask router, and DNS information
will all be populated on my device from the configurations
that we've made on our SOHO router.
One set of devices that has become rather important
in our small offices and home offices are the IoT devices.
These are the Internet of Things devices.
These are usually focused around home automation,
and they're usually connecting to your network
using 802.11 wireless connectivity.
These would be your thermostats, your light switches,
security cameras, door locks, and anything else that
talks out to the internet so that you can gain access
to these devices using your mobile phone.
From a configuration perspective on your SOHO router,
there's not much that needs to be done.
These devices will automatically communicate outbound,
which makes it very easy for you then
to connect to a central server to gain access
to these Internet of Things devices.