I agree with Marcus's comments... unless there's some reason you haven't mentioned yet that's preventing you, you should likely get some 10Mbps nic's.
The file xfer rate for anything of 'today's size' would take forever over the serial connection... but remote management via the serial connection would be fine (via tip)... especially if the boxes aren't right next to each other to swap the kvm. danno -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Marcus Watts Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 1:19 AM To: Don Smith Cc: misc@openbsd.org Subject: Re: Serial Port Network Don Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I have 2 older desktop computers (old Pentium 1 processors), ... slip or ppp. You won't be doing much file sharing this way though, unless you're *very* patient. usb doesn't do peer<->peer networking, so I don't see what good that does you. You'd be *much* better off buying a brace of ethernet cards. ISA <-> 10 megabits cards should be nearly free. You'll also have to score some thin-net cable and terminators. Alternatively, you can get twisted pair cards. If you have PCI bus machines you can do better, but that probably postdates your machines. You probably don't need a console except for maintenance. You can just swap monitors for that. You could set up a serial console & tip, but it's not worth it unless you have some other reason you want it. You probably don't want to run ppp on your console port. -Marcus
