On Wed, 21 Jul 2004 23:11:42 +0100, you wrote:
Broadband seems finaly to have arrived at my small coastal village. I have a Dell laptop with an Ethernet port and no network. Assuming I go for a wires only package, what is the most suitable hardware?
Speedtouch 510 - router, 4 port switch and ADSL modem all in one small box. If it died, I'd buy the same again.
Easy ro set up. Never yet crashed although its been taken down by power failures and once in a thunderstorm. I run a variety of boxes using DHCP and one SuSE Linux server with a ststic IP address. Just use the web interface to tell the router the IP address of the default server and away you go. http://samphire.demon.co.uk/ This server has PHP, MySQL and other tutorials on it.
The DHCP boxes just work without any further configuration.
You can do some sophisticated firewall functions too but so far I've stuck with the defaults.
I use Demon Internet mainly for historical reasons. They are not the cheapest but there is good on-line network status information and I've had few problems. Their network seens to hold up well at busy times. For example streaming audio from the BBC always seems to work.
Neil.