Home Networking...

[kandrathe]

Congratulations on your change. If you have your computer networked into your television set and its close enough to see your t.v., you will really enjoy sharing YouTube videos with the family and showing them pictures you're editing in Photoshop on the big-screen. I completely stopped cable many years ago and have not regretted it since.
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TL;DR: Screw major networks! They need to get with the times.

AppleTV has Youtube, and a bunch of stuff that are free out of the box. but yes there are some of those "Showtime Anywhere" type channels that check to see if I'm a Showtime subscriber through my cable system. I too refuse to prostrate myself before the cable Gods begging for services. Cast them down, cast them all into the fiery hells of the abyss!

I just added a second network and went through many runs of hell to get it working.

It seems the problem (one of the problems) lies with Windows 7 and its firewall. A network without a default gateway is forced to be what Microsoft calls a public network. Microsoft's published workaround is OK only until the next reboot. Not much of a solution.

I finally had to disable Windows firewall for public networks.

I guess I'm perhaps old school when it comes to my home network. I formerly ran a network security consulting services practice, where I had teams of white hat hackers helping businesses set up and secure their internal networks. We used to practice on each other for fun and education... There was nothing quite as gratifying (for us) than hacking into our friends home network, sniffing around and printing stuff out on their printer as evidence of our success.

I follow the Green-Yellow-Red firewall design for networks. With the computers software firewall acting as the barrier to the yellow zone. The bulk of my internal networking equipment is in the yellow zone (DMZ), protected from the red zone by an actual physical firewall router, which also serves DHCP (192.168.1.0 network). For some software, I need to open up ports, but I can specify in pretty fine detail who can see them. I'm pretty invisible in the cloud, but if you knew where to look, and could spoof someone like Blizzard you might be able to do something if you were really well trained in hacking.

Whenever I change anything in my configuration at home, I also then see what is visible, and if I can attack my house from my work.

My son's solution (since he's not sure what he's doing ) on software that doesn't work is to disable firewalls, which of course, sends dad into fits of conniptions. It's like you should know that if your Dad is a mechanic, you don't red-line his car, at least not when he's in the passenger seat.