On Friday, June 8, 2012, Chris Bagnall wrote: > On 8/6/12 6:12 pm, Tim Nelson wrote: > >> If you really don't need the throughput of an additional physical NIC, a >> VLAN capable switch will give you as many 'ports' as you need. :) >> > > That is in fact what I'm currently doing (with the HP 1700-8 switches). > But it's a two-box solution which, in some environments (especially small > retail shops) causes problems. Not to mention the 'waste' of having an 8 > port switch on which only 3 ports will ever be used :-) > > Kind regards, > > Chris > -- > This email is made from 100% recycled electrons > > For small locations, I use refurbished Pentium 4 and Pentium D machines with a bunch of PCI network cards (often Intel dual-port, which can now be found cheap on eBay). It doesn't look (or sound) that same as a little embedded system but it's pretty dependable.
I suppose that whether you can do that or not mostly depends on what your clients expect. I have used these in small schools, small offices (up to 50 users), construction sites, and some others. All of them were previously using home-grade wireless routers (Linksys, Belkin, etc). All of them had fiber (range 15mbit to 100mbit), so I know these boxes can handle that load. Two of them were running Squid and Squidguard. If you do go this route, stay away from Dell machines older than the Optiplex GX280. The GX270 and older all have bad capacitors on the motherboards. Moshe -- -- Moshe Katz -- [email protected] -- +1(301)867-3732
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