[NTLUG:Discuss] OT but don't know where else to ask

[Leroy Tennison]

On 07/26/2011 06:17 AM, Ralph Green wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-07-25 at 23:58 -0500, Leroy Tennison wrote:
>> Proprietary hardware has only one NIC.  Would like some redundancy to
>> the network, obvious answer is a four-port hub so that at least it can
>> be connected to two switches (appropriately configured for this
>> arrangement).  That way, if one switch is down there is another path
>> (which is what I'm after so that switch maintenance doesn't cause an
>> outage).  Problem: it's contrary to corporate standard.  Any other
>> solutions you know of that don't look/act/quack like a hub?
> Leroy,
>    Does it have a USB port?  Maybe, you could add a USB NIC.  They are
> not fast, but they are better than nothing for a backup.  Or, use a
> serial port(or maybe firewire) as a backup talking to another computer
> and then routing to the network.  I don't know enough about this
> hardware to suggest much else.  Maybe, you could add a router with
> openwrt and multiple NIC.  Plug it directly to the proprietary box and
> two NICs from it to 2 switches. The openwrt would be a point of failure,
> but a switch outage would not.  I am thinking of something relatively
> cheap, like a soekris 4801 to run openwrt.  It is commercial grade, and
> has 3 NICs.  It is only 100 MBit, and that could be a problem, depending
> on your setup.  I am new to openwrt, but I just setup a soekris 4801
> this week, and it works well.
> Ralph
>
>
>
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That was more ideas than I dreamed of getting, thank you.