Re: Networking

[Damion Yates <nospam [at] rd.bbc.co.uk>]

On Wed, 3 Nov 1999, Robert Speed wrote:

[..]

> > small pension and so am rather cash limited, what do I need to
> > do/get/buy(yuk) to link all the machines together - hardware and
>
> You need four network cards - I'm sorry to peddle my wares (no I'm not),
> I'm flogging these for a tenner a piece. You'll also need a hub - you're
> looking at around 30 notes for a 5 port.

I've found that it's much better for home LAN's to use Thinnet (BNC -
Bayonette connections) as you can keep on adding machines for ages before
having to spend any more money, I have over 100m of thinnet spare for
neighbours houses and for further expansion, should we put the NeXTSTATION in
the toilet as planned.

You tend to find 10base2 (thinnet) is given away as companies move to 10baseT
(UTP - Unshielded Twisted Pair) and throw out their old BNC networks. I got
all my cards and cables for free just by asking. We have 11 machines
networked at the moment plus an ISDN router that dials to work (BBC RD).
This has cost nothing in networks or network cards, but at ~15 quid a go for
network cards and a few quid for cables it's cheaper that going the UTP hub
route.

The cheapest network card option is two UTP machines with a crossover cable,
as all parts in that give the cheapest option, cheap UTP and two UTPcards
with no hub.

You could consider serial/parallel networks, the bandwidth for serial is
affected by distance and serial port speed, but this is the easiest and
cheapest method of all, but you'll be lucky to even get 10K/sec between
networks compared to a Meg a second over ethernet. Parallel port connections
are unlikely to work between windows and Linux well, but gives much faster
connectivity, this is limited greatly by distance though, and I don't know if
it works >5 meters or so. Plus the cables arn't easy to get.

A mixture of all three technologies would give an ok and cheap option
depending on the topology and use of computers on your network.

For example if you have two Linux boxes that are close enough for a Parallel
connection (the plip protocol) I think you can get about 50k/sec, which is
reasonable, between them. Assume your Internet connection is on one of
them, and you've followed through the information all over the internet in
setting up an ipchains based masqurading firewall. You then get 4 cheap UTP
network cards with two xover cables, these connect the two linux to two
windows boxes respectively.

You can now access the internet via a single ISP assigned IP address, from
all computers, access all computers on the LAN getting to play with all sorts
of routing (fun!). I would suggest this for the cheapest and most fun
option.

If you never plan on getting more than 5 PC's connected, and cannot find
cheap/free thinnet then go for a 5port hub and UTP as Robert suggests.
Otherwise go thinnet as I've always done. I've had a number of Home networks
and have always enjoyed the various networking fun available. Linux's
masqurading is extremely useful.

Damion

--
Damion Yates - Damion.Yates [at] bbc.co.uk

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