More than Internet: 9 tips to maximize your home network

So you’ve secured your router and ensured that all computers and other devices in your home have a stable connection to your network. You no longer have any problems with the internet. Why not take advantage of the fact that all your gadgets can communicate to do more than just get online?

Other articles in this series:

• How to choose a new router and get started with important settings
• Solve your Wi-Fi problems with these smart router settings
• Protect your home network with these essential router tweaks

File sharing

One of the seemingly simplest things you can do to get more out of your network is to start sharing files and other stuff between different devices. It was always easy in the past and you don’t have to carry around a USB stick or an external hard drive.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has made it a bit more complicated in Windows 10 and 11, including the transition to Microsoft accounts and logging in with Windows Hello. File sharing using the SMB protocol requires accounts with usernames and passwords, which most people no longer have.

But it can still be arranged, and may make sense if you have multiple computers and want to be able to move files here and there across the network. Especially if you don’t want to install any additional software or have computers with operating systems other than Windows.

File sharing settings used to be in Control Panel, but now that’s found in Settings > Network & internet > Advanced network settings > Advanced sharing settings, where the settings have their new home.

Expand the Private networks section and switch on File and printer sharing to enable the feature on networks that you have set as private. Underneath are the settings for Public networks (for example, the Wi-Fi network at a cafe), for which you can leave file sharing turned off.

Windows now assumes that all networks are public, so you also need to go to the Ethernet or Wi-Fi settings in Network & internet and change to Private network.

To connect, you also need an account with a password. Microsoft accounts are complicated, so the easiest thing to do is to create a new local account with a name and password that you only use for file sharing. You do this in Settings > Accounts > Other users. If you never log into Windows with it, the account will barely take up any space on the disk. Make sure you don’t choose administrator but default account.

When you connect, you will always access the home folder of the account you connect as, but if you want to access other folders as well, you need to enable sharing for those. Right-click on a folder you want to share in Explorer and select Properties. Select the Sharing tab and click Share. Select the new user account you created for the purpose from the drop-down menu and click Add.

One final issue you may encounter is that Windows’ built-in firewall blocks connections when it should automatically allow connections for features you have enabled, like file sharing. If you have trouble connecting, try the following:

1. Open Windows Security.

2. Select Firewall & network protection and then Advanced settings.

3. Click Inbound Rules > Ports > Protocol and ports and then New rule in the top right corner.

4. Select Protocol and Ports, fill in 445 next to Specific local ports, and select TCP.

5. After hitting Next, select Allow the connection, and on the next screen tick Private only and give the rule an informative name.

If you have a printer connected to one of the computers in your home, you can share it so that it can print from other computers on the network. On a computer running Windows 10 or 11, do this:

Open Settings and go to Bluetooth & devices > Printers & scanners. Click on the printer you want to share and then on Printer properties and a separate window will open. Select the Sharing tab and tick Share this printer. You can change the name to something more sensible if you like — in the image above, I’ve chosen the brand of the printer and the room it’s in. If I later share a Brother in the basement, for example, it will be easier to tell them apart on the network.

To add a shared printer to another computer, open Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Printers & scanners again and click Add a device. The printer should now appear and you can click Add device to the right of it. On other operating systems, of course, you do it differently. On Mac, for example, the setting is in System Preferences > Printers and Scanners.

On Android, you can usually add printers in Settings > Connected Devices > Connection Options > Printing. Select the default service (if there is none, you must first add one). Then select the network printer you want to connect to.

Printing from iOS is a little more complicated as it doesn’t have built-in support for regular network printers. If your printer doesn’t support Apple’s Airprint feature, try installing an Airprint server on your computer.

Get a NAS device

If you have a lot of computers and other devices in your home and want a centralized repository for backups and shared files, for example, a NAS device can be a good investment. It’s basically a simple server computer in a multi-hard drive enclosure, which comes with a customized operating system.

Synology is the most well-known manufacturer of NAS devices, and has the advantage that the operating system has many add-ons to run different types of servers directly on the device. Other brands include Asustor, Qnap, and Terramaster.

A NAS drive usually has space for two or four hard drives and the idea is that they should be used in a so-called raid setup that provides redundancy — if one of the drives suddenly fails, you won’t lose any files. You can then replace the broken disk and continue as before.

With four hard drives, you can choose RAID 5. If the four drives are the same size (which they should be), this means that 75 percent of the space is available for storage and that a drive can fail without losing data, but hurry up and replace a broken drive.

One thing to remember is that even if your NAS has RAID for added security, it’s not a backup, and if you store important files on it, you should definitely consider getting a separate large external hard drive to back up your entire NAS to.

Three uses for NAS

1. File server

It may sound obvious, but an always-available NAS is a great place to store files for a variety of purposes. For example, you can use it as a dumping ground for files that take up a lot of space — something that comes in handy these days when many computers are sold with relatively small but fast SSDs for internal storage. For example, you can archive photos and videos from a camera on the NAS.

Another example is if you have surveillance cameras in your home. It is often possible to set where these should store recordings, and then you can choose the NAS as the destination.

2. Backup server

How many copies of your irreplaceable files do you have? You may be familiar with the 3-2-1 rule, which means you should have at least three copies, on at least two different drives, at least one of which is in a different location. With a NAS device, you have a simple and relatively safe way to store backups of all the computers in your home, and quite easily, mobiles and tablets too.

The easiest way to do this is with a backup programme like Arq Backup or Duplicati on the computers you want to back up. If your NAS supports separate user accounts, you can create separate accounts for each family member and connect with them from the backup software. Connect with SFTP if possible, otherwise with SMB.

3. Private cloud

Instead of paying Dropbox or any other company for cloud storage, you can run your own private cloud with your NAS. This is an area where Synology is popular, as the company’s NAS devices come with a cloud sync service called Synology Drive. It’s easy to set up and has clients for most operating systems.

Security is especially important if you open any part of your home to the internet. There is no easy way to securely access gadgets in your home from outside, but of the methods available, a VPN server is probably the least complicated. Some routers, for example from Asus, have it built in.

Reuse an old computer as a server

You don’t necessarily need to buy new hardware to try running some kind of server at home. Do you have an old computer sitting in a closet/attic/storage room that was retired when you got a new one? It can work great as a server.

A desktop computer of the tower type often consumes considerably more power than a small mini PC, and of course takes up a lot of space, so in the long run it may be better to get something more appropriate. But if you’re just trying it out, or have plenty of space and don’t mind the slightly heftier electricity bill, it’s at least a cheap way to get started.

With a regular computer as a server, you can also stick to Windows if that’s what you’re used to, and avoid learning Linux, which is otherwise most common for such so-called home labs (check out the Reddit group r/homelab if you’re curious about what others are putting together at home).

1. Media server with Plex or Jellyfin

If your old computer has a sixth-generation Intel processor or later, it can work well as a media server to stream films and TV shows you own to all the devices in your home. That’s thanks to the Quick Sync Video feature that can transcode video formats so that a device or browser that doesn’t support the format the file is stored in can still play the video.

Plex and Jellyfin are the two most common media server programs. Both make sense for home users, but Jellyfin is more open and you don’t need to create an account with the developer, for example.

2. Minecraft server

Do you have children or grandchildren who like Minecraft? You can easily repurpose an old computer as a Minecraft server without having to install Linux or anything else complicated. All you need to do is install a modern version of java, create a folder for the server where you put the Minecraft server software, and then run it and follow the instructions.

There are plenty of guides, both written and on YouTube, that show you how to do this in more detail. Look up a guide if you want to run a server with different mods, for example.

3. File server

If your old computer has space for multiple hard drives, you can turn it into a NAS-like file server for shared files, backups, and anything else you would normally use a NAS drive for. A full-fledged file server can provide higher performance and more features, and if you install Linux as your operating system, you can use the ZFS file system and merge multiple hard drives into a common storage device with higher performance and increased security compared to regular RAID.

4. Smart home center with Home Assistant

This is something that’s really better suited to a Raspberry Pi, but if you’re curious to try it out and already have a computer, you don’t need to run out and buy one. You can either install Home Assistant as a full operating system or, if you already have Windows on your computer, as a virtual machine using Virtualbox or Vmware Workstation, for example.

Installed directly on the computer, it can feel like a bit of a waste of a full computer, as Home Assistant is just a simple server that requires very little hardware beyond a network connection and a USB adapter for Zigbee and/or Z-wave to directly connect smart lights and other things.

The developers of Home Assistant have made a simple guide to installing in a virtual machine on Windows, and have also prepared ready-made disc images for Virtualbox, Vmware Workstation and Hyper-V (where USB does not work, which is a major limitation if you want to use Zigbee/Z-wave).

The instructions for Virtualbox are the easiest. All you need to do is create a new virtual machine for 64-bit Linux, make sure the virtual machine uses EFI and not BIOS, select the downloaded .vdi file as the hard drive, and select the Bridged Adapter for networking and Intel HD Audio as the audio device. Note that the computer must be connected with Ethernet.

Author: Anders Lundberg, Contributor, PCWorld