Comments on: help me design my home network!

By: malvasia bianca » more home network thoughts

malvasia bianca » more home network thoughts — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 06:06:47 +0000

[...] My current network plan is as follows: [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 16:44:51 +0000

Oh! Indeed I was. So Sun brought out the Ultra {1,2,5,10,30,40,60,80} and then came back to 20? :)

- C.

By: david carlton

david carlton — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 17:10:16 +0000

You must be thinking of a different product named Ultra 20; the one that I’m thinking of is a nice little Opteron box at a list price of $900, on which I get a 35 percent discount. As far as I can tell, it is quite competitively priced, as long as you don’t buy peripherals from Sun – the collective that I’m part of (for web hosting and e-mail) just got the equivalent model in a 1U factor (Sun Fire x2100), and when we did our comparison shopping, nobody could come up with a better suggestion.

Thanks for the info!

By: Mark Gritter

Mark Gritter — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 15:47:04 +0000

Bah. Wireless. I don’t believe in wireless. So I can’t help answer your questions.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 14:59:12 +0000

> any specific buzzwords I should look out for?

Everyone uses the Linksys WRT54G, which is the moulded blue and black case wireless router that you’ve probably seen before. It’s cheap and reasonable, and has a web interface for doing things like setting up port forwarding, so you can forward ssh from the router to your Sun.

(Why get an Ultra 20, anyway? Honest question; I used them a long time ago, and liked the reliability, but surely they’re not competitive with spending $300 on a Dell desktop anymore?)

WEP is its weakest form isn’t great, but it’s a question of proportion — if someone can log your wireless traffic for a few hours and collect gigabytes of data on it then they might be able to determine your session key. But why are you using security; isn’t it to stop drive-by WiFiers from using your network and not much else? After all, your traffic’s still safe if it’s being encrypted at the application layer. I don’t know whether a router would speak WPA and WEP, but I suspect routers either support {WEP,WEP+WPA,WPA} based on their age and price.

> Any gotchas with Linux and wireless cards?

Some are glorified FPGAs that have all of their firmware uploaded when the device is plugged in, and if your Linux distribution doesn’t have permission to distribute the firmware then setup can be a annoying. Broadcom chipsets are the main offender for this.

> Is AirPort Extreme just Appleâ€™s name for 802.11g, or do they have proprietary extensions?

Just 802.11g, as far as I know. The chipset (but not what they speak on the air) is proprietary, so you couldn’t run Linux on your Mac laptop. (Well, you could if you used a USB wireless card with an open chipset.)

> How should I connect the Ultra 20?

I suppose I would seriously consider a USB WiFi device. Either that or the long ethernet cable.

- Chris.