Let's face it, we've all been there. Sitting wondering why on earth a network connection that, up until 5 minutes ago had been working just fine was now all but useless. Less tech savvy individuals may just shrug their shoulders and try again later but anybody else is left wondering why. As a reader of this blog post that fact automatically places you in the latter category. So, to the problem. Could it be that somebody else in the house has started a large download? If that's the case its the easiest to solve just by asking around but the plethora of devices that are in our houses today make the job a lot more complex. For me it was a long forgotten mobile phone owned by my son, left on charge under the bed and set to auto update its code and apps that proved the final straw and drove me to come up with a solution to this problem.

Lets look at the problem in the round first of all. Homes nowadays usually have a router which connects off to the cable company or to the telephone line. These routers allow all of the devices in the house to connect to the net whether on the wireless or the wired side of life. Its not uncommon for a home network to support 10 to 20 devices not all of which will be known about by every other member of the household. Any one of these devices has the potential to bring the network to its knees for hours at an end by starting a large download. Of course the possibility also exists that somebody else on the outside has gained access to your network and it's important that this is not overlooked.

The first step in getting a handle on the situation will be to take control of your home router and secure it so that it cannot be manipulated by anybody else. Most home routers nowadays have a small, cut-down, webserver running on board which allows a management user to access the management web page. By using this web page clients can change all of the settings on the device. The page is usually accessible by both the wired and the wireless network. If you are using a Windows machine the easiest way to establish a connection to this page is to do the following:

1. Click the pearl button and in the box which says "search programs and files" type cmd and press enter. This should bring up a window which looks like that shown on the right. Inside this window, type the command "ipconfig". The output should also resemble that shown on the right showing among other things, the address of the default gateway. Take a careful note of this address. (192.168.1.1 in this case)

1. Open up a browser, type this default gateway address into the address bar and click enter. If your router is new or poorly configured you should now be looking at the control page for the device. If the device is configured properly you should now be looking at a login prompt page.

1. Once logged in you will then be able to control the settings of the router.

This post is not written to be a guide for any specific router so I will keep any further instructions necessarily wide in scope.

The following bullets will link to posts that will be made available soon which examine the different aspects of this problem. Check back soon to see them when they become available.

• Who is connected? Checking to understand which devices are connected to your router on WIFI and wired networks and establishing whether or not they should be.

• What are they doing? Most routers show a basic table of transferred bandwidth as a part of their reporting. This can be used to examine the usage on your network and ascertain which devices are consuming most of the network.

• Securing my router. As touched on previously, the router should be configured appropriately so that only those users whom you wish to have access are able to access both the network and the routers management page.

• Customising the routers code. Home routers purchased off the shelf nowadays have woefully inadequate firmware that is frequently shown to be buggy at best and insecure at worst. Consider replacing this firmware with a fully customisable open source router such as dd-wrt or tomato.

• Open source router management. (Wireshark and SNMP) Want to take the control of your home network to the max. Consider implementing network management, bandwidth management and device management.

I hope this post has proved informative as an intro to controlling your home network. Check back soon for further updates.