25 March 2006

geek alert!

A friend kindly acquired a 24 port switch for us (his employer
decommissioned them in favour of newer equipment) to replace our little 8
port hub (which has served us amazingly well over the past 8 years). but,
the new addition is rather cool, because it is a 24 port switch, it is
configurable and it doesn't have an alarm to notify you that the power has
gone out (we initially found this to be a great feature on our hub, but it
gets a little annoying if you are experiencing power-dips, and it wails for
3 minutes every time the power dips).

It also means i can now properly segment the network, colour code the
network cables, match ports used to ip addresses, restrict our network to
trusted MAC addresses, etc, etc, etc.

And, yes, we are only 3 people in the house. With 7 computers between us. 2
of them servers.
And, somehow, we keep talking about adding more machines to the network,
because, you know, we need them. well, actually, we do... we need a media
machine in the lounge, so we don't have to mission with the laptops every
time we want to watch something other than the few DVDs that actually work
in our DVD player, we need a machine in the kitchen, so i can access the
vast database of recipes i have been building up, we need a machine in my
father-in-law's room, so hubby doesn't have to move his laptop in there
whenever the old man wants to watch something, and we need 2 new laptops,
because our current ones are way out of date. but we need to keep the
current laptops too, because they are handy.
So, that makes it an additional 5 machines. then it will be 12 machines
between 4 people. not bad going.
Of course, one day when we win lotto, i will just replace all our machines
with AlienWare *drool* machines. but then that would be spending a small
fortune, because we would also then replace most of our networking upstairs
with wireless, and all sorts of other nifty little things (like the Origami
*drool* for me).


Anyway....

I am so glad I signed up with Telkom as my service provider. Today is the
25th of March. We have used 26GB on our 3GB ADSL account, and have heard not
a single peep from Telkom, nor have we been capped, suspended or anything
else. in fact, we are still getting great speeds, and well, getting to watch
the things we want to watch when we want to watch them, rather than when our
TV provider decides we should.

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