NIC's and Hubs

[mbrodeur at nexttime.com (Matthew J Brodeur)]

On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Henry Smith wrote:

> Both you and Derek M have recommended NetGear so I am pretty much decided
> on going that way. One thing concerns me is that the Netgear site says that
> the PCI slot used must have "bus mastering" enabled. It also says that some
>
> Do you have any experience with this requirement?

   I guess I do, but I just never read the part that would have told me it
was a problem.  The research network I work with has a machine with five
NICs to capture and store every packet on each of our five subnets.  Three
of the cards are FA310TX units, each with its own interrupt.  The BIOS on
that system allows you to force each PCI slot to use a specific IRQ, so
that's what we did.
   It's been working almost flawlessly since last August, so two cards
should get along rather well.

> I also found the Netgear Dual Speed 8 port hubs at a pretty good price on

   I really like the Netgear DS309 for small networks.  It has 8 10/100
shared ports, and one 10/100 switched port.  Most systems get plugged into
the shared ports, and either the uplink to a larger network or a busy
server can be connected to the switched port.  It's better than a
shared-only hub, and a lot cheaper than a full switch.  I think they go
for around $180 now.


Matthew J. Brodeur, mbrodeur at NextTime.com
Hostmaster, Webmaster for NextTime.com, NextTime.org
http://www.NextTime.com

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