Good hardware on Gnu/Linux
I just purchased a Linksys USB ethernet adapter to try out with Gnu/Linux. I have tried it with both 32 and 64bit, and it works like a charm. It was just an experiment to see how I could create a box with a large density of LAN ports. Since im on a budget and only have dual NIC’s available, I was looking at different motherboards with lots of LAN ports. Only two I could find were Asus P5Q Premium and Gigabyte DQ6, which both had 4 onboard LAN ports. Both of them only offered 2 PCI slots. That would give me a total of 8 ports – 1 for management. That means only 7 ports. With this option, and a standard of like 6 USB ports (I havent tested an USB hub yet), I get at least 13 ethernet ports.
Again, I can recommend the Linksys version, even though there are a few vendors of USB NIC’s, Ive only tried this one. Only bad thing about it, is that the connector seems very flaky. One thing I need to do, is to get another one and see if its behaving in the presence of multiple ones. By this I mean that Gnu/Linux will keep eth5 to a certain USB port, and not switch them around.
More on all this later on.