At 08:50 AM 7/19/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>I'm helping a friend set up several computers that he wants to have access
>to the internet.  His internet provider service has already set up a
>gateway/router that I think has a 24 port switch.  Since he's not really
>concerned about file sharing between these computers, just giving them
>access to the internet, I was thinking that WinXP Home would be adequate to
>meet his needs.  I didn't think a domain based network would be necessary.
>I've since seen that WinXP Home has a limitation of 5 peer to peer networked
>computers and WinXP Pro has a limitation of 10 peer to peer networked
>computers.  Does this mean that using WinXP Home is pretty much out of the
>question, since I'm pretty sure he'll have more than 5 computers?  If he
>should end up with as many as a dozen computers accessing the internet
>through the same connection, will he need a domain based network in order to
>to this?
>
>I'm pretty comfortable with the small home networks that are easily achieved
>with a NAT router, since the built in DHCP makes these relatively painless,
>but I'm new to domain based networking.  I'm beginning to realize that I
>probably need to get familiar with it in order to be of some help in this
>situation.

John,

If you have a NAT router that supports DHCP, then you don't need any kind
of domain or workgroup for the computers if all they want is to access the
internet through the router/switch. The only time you would need a domain
or workgroup is if you want to share resources between the computers (like
drives and printers). The internet connection is independent of the other
computers.

In fact, I am pretty sure that the 5 peer (XP home) or 10 peer (XP Pro)
limitation is only the number of other computers that a single computer can
share to, not the whole network. In other words, if you have 20 computers,
one computer can share a printer with 5 others, a second computer can share
a printer with 5 computers, etc. without violating the XP home limit. It
does not, however, limit the total number of computers that can be on the
network for other reasons (internet access).


Russ Poffenberger
Credence Systems Corp.
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