OT: Moving to a new PC, Network Question

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Usually it's only necessary to disconnect the network cable from the old PC and connect it to the new one.

Does the other end of the cable go to a conventional home router, perhaps via a switch or two?

If you have some reason to want the LAN IP address to remain the same then you have to tell the router to assign that IP to the MAC address of the new PC instead of the old one. Usually this is not necessary.

Although I have worked on Linux boxes all my life (work and home) network protocola are independent of the operating system. First of all, in the last PC, was the IP address set as a static IP address, or did the home router assign it via DHCP ? If it was a static IP address on the old PC, then you would have to find the administrative console on Win 7 Pro, and set the IP address to be static. THis really simply simple. On any LAN, the network address is 192.168.1.0(never used) the gateway IP address is 192.168.1.1( gateway/router address, - used), the network mask is 255.255.255.0 and the broadcast address is 102.169.1.255. So the PC's static IP address may be set to any value 182.168.1.x with

Having the LAN IP address change shouldn't be a problem unless that PC shares some of its resources with other things on the network. So long as it gets assigned an IP address in the right subnet it will be OK.

You might need to take a look at network adaptor settings advanced if there is software on the old box you still want to use that relies on archaic MS Network protocols (check what is ticked on the old box).

On Win7 you may well have to set up a Homegroup and/or declare the network to be a home network (but I think the settings are fairly obvious and the Wiz^d^d^dDullard doesn't do too bad a job on it).

Depends really what you want to share and where it is.

Not on my LAN.

There have been changes in Linux, particularly involving the adoption of systemd initialization system, but I haven't found them all that troublesome. I still have my machines with static IP set up in /etc/network/interfaces, as it has been for many years.

This has become more complex now that I have virtualized OSs on the same machine. My home-tuned firewall is part of that complexity. And I'm _not_ a network whiz.

Most users with DHCP'd addresses won't have any trouble, just accepting the defaults on installation will be fine.

Since I use Debian there's a bit more nuisance with wireless and other special "nonfree" drivers, but there are documented solutions for all of that too.

If you still can't get this to work, you should google or ddg and you should be able to fix it (if Linux). For Debian, the usenet group is generally very helpful (don't know about other distributions).