Curious about network access

oh... 42... too bad i didn't see it!!!

why don't you just use your neighbour's wifi for the hpc?
("the" hpc? which one? )

cmonex, That would not be very nice .

When networking started to take off I dove in. I had coax (remember that?) strung all over the house. I was busy drilling holes in floors to string the stuff. I created a hazard of the worst kind.

Ugh. After all that work twisted pair became the rage. OK, pull out the coax and string Cat4 to my shiny new 10bt hub. All these silly computers sharing a 56k dialup through a *nix box configured as a router.

When 100bt became cheap enough it was time to redo the dance. Bought a switch, made my cat5 cables. This time though I didn't wire every room as I pared my fleet down substantially, from 8-9 machines to 3. About this same time I got cable internet, so I bought a barricade router for shared access. Funny, in those days I could see every other computer on my loop in Network 'hood, and most of them were open access.

I went through a few routers, trying them on for size and in early 2003 I got my Dlink G router for free after rebates. Hmm, it has wireless so I guess it's time I got a wireless device. So I went through a number of garbage Toshiba E740s. (I rarely hate items but they are really crappy and buggy. Totally unpredictable, they hard reset when you sneeze.)

My first reliable ppc, a J565 with a Spectrum CF wifi provided hours of fun. I've never looked back since then, other than shedding PCs and PC accessories that collected dust.

I'll admit I'd still be wired if I had a second PC. Even G speeds are a little slow moving large files around. But I read 260mpbs N is on the horizon. That means little to us B constrained hpc types but wired types can now shuck them forever and have fast access.

Wifi has given me the total freedom I couldn't get even with every room wired.

wow... ive had only this one router.. i'm too tired, will go to sleep very soon. but i'll try to take care of that damn router tomorrow... worst case, it is still in warranty... just 8 months old...

I remember BNC COAX... not very fondly though. TP was/is far superior IMHO.

I went for the expensive option and CAT6'd my entire house at a time when it wasn't cost effective or 'sane' to do it.
Given the common place nature of Gbe these days, and remembering how painfully difficult it was to run the main bus cable between the upstairs and downstairs switches (from the downstairs rack, around the skirting board, through the external wall, up the side of the house, into the attic through an air vent, down under the floor boards, down a switch conduit on the main lighting circuit, into the upstairs switch. All in all, if one could draw a straight line, no more than probably 2 - 3m... well that too 26m

Each of the upstairs room drops go from the switch up the lighting conduit, along beneath the attic floorboards and down their respective drops, with the exception of the one into my room which goes directly through the wall and into a second switch.

The downstairs drops go through the skirting boards.

Funnily enough I only completed the wiring to a level that I was happy with a few months ago (despite doing all this in around 2001/2) when I got out a really big drill and made a hole through a breezeblock partition between my office and the server farm, ran a nice short bus cable between their set and the switch in my office. I then did a second one for a new power feed into the servers too - finally removing this blue cable that has wrapped around my stairs for the past (X to the n) years.

My router is a Draytek VoIP Vigor 2600V, and I think even Clint is a tiny bit green over it (something that does not happen very often). I have a backup dial-up router (which isn't active outbound), which poses as a dial-in bridge, that's a Netgear., switches are all netgear and the LAN runs off of a Windows 2000 / 2003 hybrid at the moment.

I have PPTP, L2TP and IPSec VPN access at 128-bit both with segmented accounts both onto my LAN, into my public LAN areas (music and patch archive) and one for Remote Desktop only.
RDP and VNC remote management, I have a on-demand remote access stream to a TV card so that I can watch TV wherever I am (that includes in the house - WiFi would make that grounds )

When I did have 802.11b here last, it was locked down, no SSID broadcasting 128-bit with a super-sized key

There also used to be a guided tour of my LAN, I had tour guides to show off the sites and sounds, but people kept taking souvenirs for their collections, and the constant flash photography... well, it wreaks havoc on the neo-classical artwork

260mb/sec...how much radiation would that be putting out?

I prefer wired. I like the control, the knowledge that the only thing keeping it from working is whether it is plugged in (or if all the wires are in correctly for switchboards), and that is all. Very nice.

802.11b is fine for when I do want to leave the house, and considering that my signal goes down the block...

And no one try breaking in either, even if they do get past the key, they would be found in record time. And since those kind of people would leave shared folders open and their XP computers open, well - the connection works both ways.

And yes, to see every computer on my network just means a short trip to 172.16.0.1.

hey well the hard reset didn't help, what's more it would not even connect to adsl even in switch mode.
but i could still access the settings page and upgraded the firmware to the newest one (just a little newer than the original one was though). it wasn't easy because there were three files, and the second (config file update) was corrupted. i had to redownload the whole update via GPRS (ssh... too lazy to dig out the old switch or just connect directly) and it turned out the file was corrupted in that too. so i just skipped that step and now it seems to be working very well again!
so thanks for the idea on upgrading the firmware... if it stops working again i'll really have to find the warranty papers.

Edited by cmonex 2005-12-09 12:58 AM

geez, nope. dhcp isnt working and i had to completely disable it to get online via wlan. (lan was ok interestingly)
i'll live with this until i find those papers.