[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2002 at 11:53:12AM -0400, Chris Hedemark wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-06-25 at 11:21, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> 
> > Why do I need that much bandwidth?
> 
> You might not.  Many people do.
> 
> Two of the biggest network hogs that come to mind are X11 and NFS.
> Having 10x network performance to the desktop over 10BaseT makes a very
> real and tangible difference.
> 
> > I work off my local disk most of
> > the time.  I'd rather have a second machine in my office rather than
> > upgraded networking.
> 
> The investment might not make sense for you then.  More power to you.

Well, keep in mind these are two seperate environments.  At home I run
X11 and NFS, and I'd love to upgrade the net to 100mbit.  I'm keeping
my eyes peeled for an affordable good switch.

But at work, I don't use the network much other than for Putty to
school, a little web usage, and dumping finished work (where the files
are never more than a meg or 2) back to the network.

And, it isn't my budget at work, and unfortunately there are issues
other than budget that get in the way of things (like say the IT dept.).
 
> I keep 100Mbps connections to the necessary machines.  But most of the
> boxes are fine at 10Mbps and the hardware is increasingly available for
> free.  I just picked up a couple of rack mount managed hubs for free
> over the weekend, each one with around 50 ports available.  For a 1500sf
> house I will never even get into the second hub unless I have all of my
> machines on at once.

Right now I have a few stupid hubs.  One is in use mounted in the
ceiling of the guest room to service the office above it, and the
family room.  Another is kept nearby for when I want to do some
sniffing.  The rest are in deep storage since I haven't run out of
ports on my 16port 10mbit switch (with FDDI and 100mbit uplink
cards).  I'm trying to keep my eyes open for a nice 100mbit switch for
the machines where it would make a difference (the main linux
workstation, the file server, the windows machine, and eventually the
Mac 8100).  I'm thinking something in the 8-16port range.  I don't
know how smart I want it to be.  I supose being an unmanaged switch
might be oK for this task.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd