On 25/06/10 23:34, John Hasler wrote:
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).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.
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 solidI 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.
-- Alan Chandler http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk