Home Networking: The Missing Manual

Chapter 9. Using Your Network on the Road

Your home network doesn't have to be restricted to your home. Assuming you can tear yourself away from the networked fun you learned about in Chapter 8, the time may come when you're out of the house and want to hop back onto your home network. Perhaps you need a document, want to hear a favorite song, or just want to enjoy the pure geek thrill of creating a folder on your desktop PC from 3,000 miles away. Good news: using the Internet as the world's longest extension cord, you can tap into your networked computers using a variety of tools. Some of these methods are for hard-core computer lovers, but many new methods are now available that make this whole world of remote access—connecting long distance from one computer to another—pretty easy for the average civilian.

To help you keep the roles of the various computers involved in a remote access operation straight, the computer industry has done you the favor of introducing specialized terminology—and learning these terms now will help keep your brain from tying itself in knots:

• The host computer is the home-base computer—the one that's sitting there, waiting for you to connect to it. It could be your office computer (if you con nect to it from home) or your home computer (if you connect to it from your laptop on the road).

• The remote computer is the one that will do the connecting: your laptop on the road, for example, or your home machine when you tap into the office network.

The remote ...