Alan Chandler wrote: > On 25/06/10 23:34, John Hasler wrote: >> Merciadri Luca writes: >>> ...what else can you buy if you need to connect>4 computers? >> >> Put 2 NICs in an old pc and install Debian. It'll outperform any >> consumer-grade router on the market. Buy a switch to connect all your >> computers. >> > Until November last year I had been running an old Celeron to do just > that. I started a few years before when one christmas there was a > worm going round which caused my router to receive about 7000 arp > messages a second - needless to say I go through two netgear routers > and a d-link one before I decided a PC was the way to go. It never > got near to falling over, and at the same time ran the firewall, and > mail, dns dhcp and backup services for the home and my external web > sites (several). > > This computer had up-times exceeding a year and only went down when we > had an external power failure or I needed to upgrade the disks (I > started with a single 8.4G IDE drive and finished up with 2 * 120G > SATA and 1 * 200G IDE. > > Last November I switched all this over to a Sheeva Plug > (www.plugcomputer.org) in order to try and be more energy efficient > and that is what I am running today. However I can't recommend it, > and am just about to switch back to a PC because > > > a) It blew the power supply which then blew up the computer and took > down the SD Card in it (I had spares, so could rebuild one from my > backup and carry on). Upon investigation on the plugcomputer forums > this seems to be a regular occurrance and looks like poor design, so I > am migrating back off it as soon as possible and will use the sheeva > plug as a portable server. > b) It did still occassionally lockup solid > > I have a switch using several wired connections for our desktop PCs > and a wireless access point plugged into the switch as a way of > creating a lan. > > Thanks for this suggestion. -- Merciadri Luca See http://www.student.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~merciadri/ I use PGP. If there is an incompatibility problem with your mail client, please contact me. It's the early bird that gets the worm.
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