Quoted for truth. I damn near gave myself a conniption trying to originally set-up my broadband for use on all my PCs thru an old hub, a $25us DSL/router made it into a 15 minute easy-as-cake walk-thru for me and it hasn't given me a lick of trouble since. (And that was years ago!)DiGuru said:A router is easier and about as expensive as a network card.
yeah, and all 3 boxes with public IPs!MPI said:Damn I love having 5 IPs... Incoming eth. -> Switch -> 3 boxes.
Easy as pie and no hassle with routers(NAT mostly, somewhat concerned about throughput).
MPI said:Hackfest... mmmyeah right. If you think a $40 router off the shelf of circuit city is an impregnable wall of infinite security you'll have some nasty surprises in store, I'm afraid... The box better be secured no matter you're behind a cheap-ass NAT router or not. If we're talking a decent SPI-capable fire-wall, well that's another matter.
Furthermore, by far the largest reason for home computers being compromised is trojans and virii(?), not outside attacks.
I hate mucking about with port forwarding also. It's ok when there's just a pop-up in the software f/w when you start some new program/game and just open it up, but do you realise how many family/friends "support" calls I've gotten b/c this and that doesn't work? NAT si teh suck.
Agreed about the price thing, but if ICS works well out of the box (as I said, sometimes it can be troublesome) you don't have a router to set up for port forwarding, and if the connection isn't permanent, as it seems, it's a lot more convenient to plug the cables on both computers than buying a router. Most modems connect through USB anyway, so chances are you don't even have to buy a network card.DiGuru said:A router is easier and about as expensive as a network card.
do you really transfer multi-gig files that often?A router is more convenient in a students flat where everyone has to share the connection independently of having one computer turned on all the time, though. I wouldn't recomend a wireless router for this because transfering files in the LAN is painfully slower.
On average, NAT gives better protection than any firewall.
DiGuru said:Did you ever check the log of a router, say two hours after the connection went live? What do you see?
Well, yes, all security takes work. If you want to avoid all of that, just turn it all off.
No, but when I do and everyone will do something like this eventually, it's a pain, even with 100mbit, nevermind 54 or 11. Add to that security and connection issues (common in cheap wireless routers) and wireless is almost always a bad choice.The Baron said:do you really transfer multi-gig files that often?A router is more convenient in a students flat where everyone has to share the connection independently of having one computer turned on all the time, though. I wouldn't recomend a wireless router for this because transfering files in the LAN is painfully slower.
Try firewire networking. Awesome. With standard 400Mbit FW, I got real-world transfer rates of about 230Mbit/s. Might have been even faster with a faster CPU in the sending computer...t0y said:No, but when I do and everyone will do something like this eventually, it's a pain, even with 100mbit, nevermind 54 or 11.