My coeditors (Paul Dubois and Konstantin Läufer) and I are among a growing number of individuals who install and maintain a home computer network. When Paul and I first discussed the idea of writing an article about the subject several months ago, my first thought was that you--our cherished readers-might consider this whole notion so trivial as to not be worthy of a column that focuses mostly on scientific programming and software development topics. But based on the realization that we three computer scientists devote a significant part of our time to network and system administration, it almost goes without saying that networking is becoming more commonplace at home than at work.