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I threw this system together in under an hour. All the parts
with the possible exception of the floppy drive, were old
and obsolete. An assembled, working PC is a better choice
if you are not comfortable with building hardware. This system
does not have a hard drive. Freesco can work just fine without
a hard drive. Removing the hard drive from an existing system
can cut down on the noise and energy consumption. My Freesco
box runs for 24 hours a day. Those extra 20-30 watts can add
up on the electric bill over the course of a year.
Configuring
the Ethernet cards
I set one Ethernet card to 0x300, IRQ10 and the other to 0x320,
IRQ3.
Some Ethernet cards are configured by jumper connectors or
DIP switches. The newer cards are often configured by software.
More often than not, this is a small DOS program which interrogates
The card and displays the current configuration. These settings
can then be changed if needed.
One of these cards was the jumperless type. I created a boot
disk with DOS and copied the network card configuration program
to this disk. Don't forget to configure the cards and make
note of their settings before configuring Linux.
I choose RG-58 coax cable (10Base-2 or Thin-Net) for the internal
network because I already had the cards and cable and it does
not need a hub.
RG-45
twisted-pair can be faster than the 10 Mbit/sec coax network
but broad-band Internet with a cable modem is a bottle neck
at 1.5 Mbits/sec on a good day.
The
computers are daisy-chained together with the coax cable.10Base-2
is an older network technology and parts are getting harder
to find. I would only recommend 10Base-2 if you already have
the cable and Ethernet cards or you can get them for next
to nothing. If you have to buy new Ethernet cards and cable,
I would strongly recommend RG-45 twisted-pair with a 10Base-T/100Base-T
Ethernet card. This will allow for network upgrades and expansion
down the road.
Important
tip:
If
going with the coax, do not forget to put termination resistors
at each end of the chain. Some cards have the termination
resistors on the circuit and are jumper selected.
If you are going with the RG-45 twisted pair cable you will
need a Hub to connect the network to the router.
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