…And Gigabit For All
The Gigabit switch came in a day later than I expected, but it’s all up and working now. That means my LAN is fully Gigabit!
Really, this is quite an exciting upgrade. First and foremost it makes my network faster. But what’s also important is the fact that I actually have some spare ports to work with now. Before, I had two routers hooked together using a normal Ethernet cable connecting two of the LAN ports. (That works for joining switches because of how Ethernet works; ordinarily I think you need a crossover cable but my WRT54GL supports automatic crossover.) The new switch is hooked into the WRT54GL in the same way, because I still need the wireless access point and it’s nice to have the GL functioning as a PPPoE bridge without me having to configure something manually on yet another Linux or FreeBSD gateway box.
Benchmarks are relatively promising – 32MB/sec was the rate I recorded for HTTP transfers. That’s up from about 10.5MB/sec on the 100Mbps network – about a 3x speed increase, not bad and especially good to know that i have a much fatter pipe so it’s possible to conduct operations in parallel (can you say “distcc”?).
The switch itself is a Netgear ProSafe JGS516 with 16 ports, 8 currently used by myself and the computers used by others in my house. There’s a fan on the side but its noise is nothing against the fans in Nighthawk and Bigmomma (contrary to the reviews).
And of course I have the bragging rights associated with a rainbow stream of 8 cables running their way out of a switch that looks much more like a business product than a consumer product. Sure you get better ping times and a few spare ports, but it’s always the looks that count the most!