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| Network Software Tools |
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Software August 2006 • Vol.10 Issue 5 |
 Network Software Tools Manage your home or business network the easy way with these simple-to-use programs | ||
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Windows XP machines come with the ability to form networks right out of the box. Early AppleTalk-compatible Macintosh computers aside, it hasn’t always been easy to connect PCs to each other, so this was a welcome development. However, Windows built-in networking tools still leave much to be desired. Even experts sometimes have a difficult time setting them up correctly. It’s not always trivial to create a wireless network from scratch, to navigate through multiple dialog boxes to share a printer, or to connect to network shares in order to retrieve files. Enter SingleClick Systems and Pure Networks. These two vendors recently introduced network software tools called HomeNet Manager and Network Magic, respectively, that don’t really fit into prior utility program categories. An entire market of network tools has existed for years on the corporate and business side, and there are some free programs out there for specific tasks such as network monitoring (see the sidebar entitled “Free Network Tools” for more information on these). But until these two products hit the market, no one had really created a value-priced offering that included a suite of network setup, monitoring, sharing and protection tools before, particularly with a focus on wireless home networks. HomeNet Manager and Network Magic give you a top-down view of all the computers, routers, Web cams, printers, and other gear on your network. In some situations, you could find yourself using this as an interface more than Windows Explorer or the Windows XP Start menu. For example, when you click on an icon for the Internet, a browser window opens. If you click on a computer icon, that machine’s directory structure will appear in a new window. Sharing printers and folders between computers is often no more than a few mouse clicks away. In other words, you can control your network from one place, instead of having to deal with all of Windows XP’s various configuration dialog boxes. These two programs go beyond basic network setup and maintenance, however. Anyone who has taken a laptop from their home and connected it to an office, hotel, or coffee shop hot spot knows that configuring a machine for new environments is just as fiddly as the initial setup. Worse, the security situation is often different; corporate networks usually have specific log on procedures and tight security, while coffee shops and other public Wi-Fi networks often have no security at all. These two programs can help you manage these wildly different environments by saving multiple profiles and allowing you to choose between them with a click of your mouse button. In this article we’ll discuss the two main network software tools from SingleClick Systems and Pure Networks. We’ll show you what you can expect to be able to do with these programs. We’ll also tell you their limitations so that you can better decide whether or not one of them is right for you. HomeNet Manager 3.0 $39.95 (with free 30-day trial) SingleClick Systems www.homenetmanager.com When you first install HomeNet Manager, it will find your router and detect all of your equipment. Once your computers are connected to each other, they’ll all be able to access the Internet (if they weren’t already able to do this before). The main window includes a series of wizards that let you do basic tasks such as sharing folders and attaching printers. You can also do this by dragging and dropping one piece of gear onto another. To access a resource, all you have to do is click on it. For example, click on your router and its configuration page will appear, instead of having to type 192.168.2.1 or some other address into your Web browser. It’s a far cry from having to visit various configuration windows and wizards in Windows XP in order to browse computers, set up shared folders, and manage machines leaving and joining the network. HomeNet Manager makes it simple to share media around the house, like photos, music, and video files. You can then decide to keep them all on a single computer for easy storage and retrieval, though nothing is stopping you from putting them on multiple machines if so desired, such as with separate media folders for each member of the household. HomeNet Manager also provides tools for securing your wireless network. While it doesn’t provide a sophisticated firewall, anti-spyware software, or anti-virus software like some popular security suites do, it does make sure that your router’s firewall is configured correctly, and it lets you easily set up WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) security with a security key. HomeNet Manager also transparently activates MAC address filtering, which prevents other computers from accessing your network. Without this software, setting up MAC address filtering is a fairly cumbersome process that involves learning the 12-digit address for each computer and entering it manually into your router’s configuration page. More significantly, HomeNet Manager automatically monitors network components. It can detect and (hopefully) fix lost connections, without you having to enter the Windows XP Wireless Networks page and fiddling around with connecting, reconnecting, or “repairing” your connection. Finally, HomeNet Manager supports many multiple configurations; this way you can take your laptop from home to your office and connect to multiple networks without having to erase any of your settings. SingleClick Systems offers a 30-day trial for HomeNet Manager; the product has a one time cost of $39.95. HomeNet Manager also comes preloaded for free on many new Dell desktop and laptop computers, where it’s renamed the Dell Network Assistant. Network Magic $19.95 per year (for up to 3 PCs) for Premium version, free for Basic version Pure Networks, Inc. www.networkmagic.com On the surface, Network Magic is similar to HomeNet Manager. Like the SingleClick Systems product, Network Magic offers a single-window interface to your entire home network. Rather than focusing on wizards (which are still available on other tabs), the main screen shows a map of all your devices, which can be easier to process visually at a glance. To access a resource, you simply click on it in the same manner as HomeNet Manager. Pure Networks includes a powerful feature in Network Magic called Net2Go Manager, which gives you the ability to put your files on the Internet via a password-protected VPN. This is similar to Avvenu, an admittedly free single-purpose tool for remotely accessing your PC (see sidebar). Like Avvenu, Net2Go Manager can’t control your PC, but it can let you retrieve files while you’re away from your main PC. Net2Go Manager lets you share both public folders with your family and friends, and private folders with anyone that you give the password to. It also gives you a Web address that you can type in from any browser to access files. Network Magic includes wireless intruder detection, which lets you keep an eye on your network for unwanted guests. It also provides a Network Lock, which is essentially MAC address filtering, but without the ugly process of having to manually type in all of the MAC addresses (similar to HomeNet Manager). In addition, all the shares on each machine appear automatically; no more hunting down through nested folder trees to find files. And Network Magic can automatically turn off file shares on your laptop when you take it out of the house and bring it to a public hotspot, which is a boon for security. Network Magic only works with PCs; Macintosh and LINUX machines are excluded. It does work with PCs as far back as Windows 98, though now that Microsoft has officially ended support for Windows 98 machines, we don’t really recommend that you keep those connected to the Internet in any way, even from behind a firewalled network. At this point you should upgrade those machines to Windows XP, trade them in for something newer, or disconnect them from the network to use as standalone word processors or backup machines. Network Magic Premium costs $19.95 per year for up to three PCs, $29.95 per year for up to five PCs, and $39.95 per year for up to eight PCs. Pure Networks offers a 30-day free trial of Network Magic Premium, after which the program reverts to the aforementioned free Network Magic Basic version that lacks file sharing and remote access features.  But do you really need these programs? On the face of it, Network Magic and HomeNet Manager are simply overlays that lie on top of the Windows XP operating system. Although some extraneous features are included, such as remote access for your files, and intelligent security reconfiguration based on what network you connect to, by and large the main features of these two programs are already present in Windows XP. The difference is in ease of use; both these programs make you feel like you can accomplish sophisticated wireless networking tasks without actually being an IT employee. During testing, we ran into some connection issues with both products. One computer we tried couldn’t work with HomeNet Manager at all. When we installed it, the program took down a perfectly good WPA-PSK connection and then couldn’t get itself reconnected through HomeNet Manager, no matter how many times we re-entered the security key or rebooted the system. Uninstalling HomeNet Manager from the Control Panel immediately caused that machine to connect to the network again without any problems. Another machine with Network Magic installed didn’t like our test router unless we disabled the WPA-PSK security. What the software does do is present everything about your home network in a clear, easy to use interface. This is something that many technical newbies could appreciate, especially if they’re on their way to Windows Power User status and they want to learn more about the way their network operates. If you’re already an expert, you can probably do without them, unless you need specific features that you don’t currently have, such as the remote access or logging tools. Setting up Windows XP networking is certainly easier than, say, setting up a Novell network in DOS and coding your own CONFIG.SYS files. But it’s still not particularly forgiving, especially if one machine can’t talk to another for some reason. Often you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time staring at a frozen window, wondering if the connection will or will not go through. A few caveats aside, both HomeNet Manager and Network Magic are good enough that you’ll likely think this is how Windows XP should have worked right out of the box. It remains to be seen if Vista will make things easier, but until then, these two products both go a long way towards alleviating frustration with your wireless network.  by Jamie Lendino
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