> Thanks to George Viera for the offer of advice for a basic home network.
> Well where do we start? Someone just gave me an old 586 box. So what do
> I get next?
> 2 NIC cards, some cables and hub?
> I'd like to try to document this setup for others further down the line.
What do you want the network to do ? Play games, 1 machine shares internet
access ? etc ?
Enough nics for the machines is a good start, if you go to the north
rocks markets on a sunday you can pick up cabling, hubs and nic's for a
good price. If you only want 10mb nics make sure to get pci ne2000 clones,
i've never seen one of these that wasn't a realtek card, and they work
really nicely under linux. Of course anything by 3com or intel is probably
good as well, but only get PCI network cards(assuming you have spare pci
slots in the machines). Some people might quibble about this advice, but
trust me, pci network cards get auto detected under windows, and under
redhat linux's kudzu hardware detecting tool. ISA cards dont. Also the pci
ne2000's are usually < $20.
I got an 18 port 10Mb hub at the markets for $50, so have a look
around. There all pretty much the same.
Cable again, look for a good price, its all pretty much the same.
That should get you started.
Get all of the cards installed and configured, and try pinging across the
network.
Jason
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