Share printers, files, Windows Media Centers, game consoles over a home network

Posted on November 21, 2007 at 9:29 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Network Printing series!

PrinterAnywhere- Network Printing the Easy Way
How to install a network printer on your home or office network
How to share a printer on your home network that doesn’t have a network card
Share printers, files, Windows Media Centers, game consoles over a home network

How many networked devices do you have at your home? Want to share your network with others not only within your home network, but also with others such as friends or family? Network sharing is one of those topics that most people would love to be able to do, but find that it’s usually too complicated or time-consuming to figure out.

With so many networked devices in homes these days, such as networked printers, networked game consoles, Windows Media Center servers, Tivos, network attached storage devices, etc, it would be really cool if you could share all of your networked devices with people you trust.

LeafNetworks is a network sharing software company that is trying to take away all of the fear and struggle behind sharing devices over the Internet. LeafNetworks allows you to create your own secure virtual private network with friends and family and allows you to control access to any device on your network. This means you can not only share files and folders with others, but all kind of other networked devices and applications.

For example, you can create your own private network and play Xbox or Xbox 360 with anyone anywhere or automatically share pictures with everyone by placing pictures into a folder.

Once you download and install the software, LeafNetworks uses some advanced technology to create a virtual private network between your computer and your friends. However, they do so in a way that does not degrade the performance in bandwidth, as most VPNs do. Once the network is formed, you can install plugins to listen to other types of traffic on your network, such as an Xbox, Tivo, UPnP, etc. The plugins will pick up the traffic and route it to the selected members on another LAN.

Here are a couple of the main features that LeafNetwork promotes for it’s software:

Play your favorite game console across the Internet – Users can play anyone connected to the Internet by starting their console as a game server. Other members will be able to see your Xbox or Xbox 360 as a game server and join it.
Remotely access friends pictures, music, and movies on your digital media receiver – You can stream music and videos from a remote friends computer onto your digital media receiver (Windows Media Center). The other person has to simply enable media sharing on their Windows Media Center.
Access your files all the time from anywhere – When you share files, you can choose exactly who has access to them and which permissions they have. The folders appear as normal folders on the computer of the person viewing them. You can quickly access your office files from a home computer or laptop.
Create your own virtual private network – Once the network is setup, you can access everything as if you were on the same LAN, such as printers, PC games, shared folders, etc.

The setup is very easy and you can have your network setup in no time! Great way to share out just about anything connected to your network with others.

Definitely worth checking out if you’ve been looking for a quick and easy way to share network devices with friends or family. It’s also great for streaming videos and music from another person’s Windows Media Center. Enjoy!

[tags]share network, network sharing, network file sharing, network printer sharing, share files on a network, windows media player network sharing, share files network, share printer over network, share video over network, how to share a network[/tags]

» Filed Under Software Reviews

Comments

One Response to “Share printers, files, Windows Media Centers, game consoles over a home network”

Video Games Console Nintendo Wii PS3 PS2 PSP Xbox 360 GameBoy PlayStation Says:

[...] director – PCs trump.. Video Games Blog » Dungeon Lords expansion, sequel announced, worl.. Share printers, files, Windows Media Centers, game consoles over a home net.. The Hottest Video Game Console | Late Gamers Reviews Wii Zapper Now Available at Wii News – Video [...]
November 21st, 2007 at 1:23 pm