Introduction

When you think of the word server, you probably first imagine either a massive mainframe hulking behind locked doors in the bowels of some large corporation, or a powerful and very expensive desktop-like device full of esoteric hardware that helps it—and perhaps a few others like it—run the network of a medium-sized company. The common thread here is that we’ve always thought of servers as business machines. With the exception of a few hardcore geeks and technical writers (not that the two designations are mutually exclusive), having a server in your home seemed, well, excessive. What home needs the power of a server? What home can afford the expense of such a high-end device?

But then a funny thing happened: times changed. All those one-computer households suddenly became two-, three-, and even four-computer households; broadband became nearly ubiquitous, and of course every family member wanted a piece of the new pipe; we began digitizing our media en masse, and we wanted to share that media with other members of the family and with other devices scattered around the house; and we discovered wireless computing and became addicted to working and playing anywhere we wanted. The result has been an explosion of home networks over the past few years.