April 26, 2001
The USB Network Adapter Roundup is now up!  We answer two questions in the article:

1. Which is the best USB network adapter?
2. Should you even consider buying a  USB network adapter?

April 22, 2001
Aright! Our team won the water polo tournament!  It was a lot of fun but I'm tired as a dog.  Okay check this out - Best Buy has some good networking deals this week.  Prices last until next Sat but they might run out of the products if you don't nab them fast:

Linksys LNE100TX 10/100 PCI network card: $4.99 ($25 - $15 instant rebate - $5 mail in rebate)
Linksys EZXS55W 10/100 5 port switch: $29.99 ($60 - $20 instant rebate - $10 mail in rebate)

Both are very good deals!

April 20, 2001
Another set of exams have come and gone and fortunately, I can say I escaped relatively unharmed.  Who would have thought that the human body could be so complicated!  Just kidding.

I want to let you know that a new article is coming out very soon about USB network adapters.  I'll be comparing several different models and also examining the whole concept of USB network adapters in general.  Here's a question to ponder:  All of the USB network adapters have the label "10/100 Mbps" but did you know that the current limit of USB transfer speed is 12 Mbps?  Hmmmm.. Something doesn't sound right does it?  Interested?  Good come back soon and I'll give you the low down.

It's now 3:00 am and I have a water polo game to play in tomorrow morning at 9:00 am.  Time to go to bed.  I hope I remember how to swim..  Dang, studying gets in the way of everything!

April 16, 2001
Check it out, Best Buy now has the Netgear FA311 on sale for $4.99 ($19.99 - $10 instant rebate - $5 mail in rebate).  So out the door, it's about $10 bucks, and if you're lucky, you'll get your rebate and then the network card will be $5 smackers.  Not bad at all.  You can take a look at Best Buy's weekly ad online at BestBuy.com.  Of course, you can still get your Intel® PRO/100+ Management Adapter w/WOL for $17.50 shipped here from a member of our forums.

April 15, 2001
Here's something pretty cool that I ran across.  It's a website/service called Uptimes.net.  This website keeps track of the uptime of your server.  You have to download a client (they have clients for almost every operating system) and then the client contacts the central server an keeps a record of different stats of your server uptime.  You can check the uptime of your server from any where on the Internet.  You can also have an icon with the current uptime of your computer on the website itself.  I added this cool new toy into the Tests/Tools Section.

Here the uptime of DSL/Cable Webserver - Click on the icon for more info.

This icon will reside permanently in the Site Info page in case your looking for it later.
Pretty neat eh?

When you click on the icon, you'll see that the server load is only about 2-3 percent.  This is because I disabled RC5 cracking so I could take a look at cpu usage for the next few days.  I'll enable RC5 again soon and then you'll see that the cpu load is a steady 100%.  Don't waste those cpu cycles!

April 13, 2001
There will be only a few updates around here for the next week and a half.  I have exams next Wednesday and Friday.  They don't look too good.  Tidbit for the day.  For those of you who worry about the reliability of DSL for hosting a website, I've been able to manage 99.6% uptime for the past 2 weeks (I didn't start counting until then).  Many people that I have spoken with have similar figures for the DSL or cable modem lines.  Remember, paid web hosts also have downtime, usually around 99.9%, but downtime is downtime.

April 9, 2001
We now have a new Member Site!  Check it out at: http://www.ImberMedia.net

April 9, 2001
Here's a cool deal that I ran across.  A member of our forums is selling Intel® PRO/100+ Management Adapter w/WOL for $17.50 shipped.  This is a great price.  I paid about $65 for the card and even if you look really hard, the card is going to cost you at least twice as much.  I believe the cards are OEM with HP labeling which doesn't really matter since the cards are still the same.  The seller has agreed to lower the price to $16.50 if you buy two cards or more if you register in our forums.  Registration is free of course and all you have to do is post a reply in this thread saying you want to purchase two or more cards and then email him your order.  Don't forget to mention that you're a member of DSL/Cable Webserver Forums to get your discount!  If you have any questions, feel free to email him or post a question in the thread.  This is really a great card folks.  Check it out in our Network Card Roundup.

April 8, 2001
A few site improvements have occurred over the past few days.  Since this site uses frames, in the past when people linked to specific pages, the menu bar would get lost, or to put it technically, the page became "orphaned".  I found some javascript to correct that so when you link to a particular page, the menu bar will always follow.  However, this is not true of the forums.  I couldn't get the javascript and cgi to mix.  Oh well.  Another thing I did was give the Network Card Roundup it's own button on the menu bar.  Now you can always find it.  I added a Home button so you can always get to this main page, and finally, I added a Tell a Friend page.  This page allows you to email a friend about this website.  If you know anybody who might be interested in running their own server on DSL or Cable, please use the Tell a Friend page.

April 5, 2001
Today I updated the Network section with a small table of what kind of network cable to use in different situations.  Now you never have to ask "Am I supposed to use a straight through cable or a crossover cable?"  I think the table should cover most options.  Here are some stats for you people who wonder what a 128k DSL line can really handle.  I didn't say handle fast, but simply handle.

April 4: 1213 people viewed the Network Card Roundup
April 5: 1236 people viewed the Network Card Roundup

I expect these numbers to plummet in a few days to maybe 10-20 views a day.  Ah, life on the Internet is so short! 

A last note:  You would not believe how much junk email I got in the past week!  It seems that if you get visitors to your site, you also get junk email too!  Since I figure the number of visitors to decrease now that the Network Card Roundup is old news, I wonder if the junk email will subside.  I doubt it.  Dang spammers.

I am off to bed.  Good Night!

April 4, 2001
I updated the Network Card Roundup to reflect some changes that you guys have pointed out.  Scott pointed out that the SOHOware SFA110A is actually based upon the Macronix MX98715 controller and not the Realtek chipset.  I believe that this is the same chipset that the Netgear FA310TX and some versions of the Linksys LNE100TX cards use.  Thanks for the info Scott!

April 3, 2001
Today was my birthday so I went out with some good friends to celebrate.  Now I'm the nice and mature age of 24!  Funny how birthdays start flying by as you get older.  The last birthday that I really remember being acutely aware of was when I turned 16.  Everything after that just started to blur.  It'll be funny next year when I turn 25 since I'll be a quarter of a century old!  Wow.

A lot of exciting things have been happening at DSL/Cable Webserver!  The Network Card Roundup is getting a lot of attention from around the Internet.  So do you want to know what a 768k/128k DSL line can support?  Actually for webserving, it's basically just a 128k DSL line.  Think about that, it's only 2x faster than a 56 modem!  Here are the stats:

April 2: 1851 people viewed the Network Card Roundup
April 3: 3764 people viewed the Network Card Roundup

This is not including the people who visited the front page, forums, or my 12 other websites.  I think those numbers are pretty impressive for a DSL line.  Today, I had over 480 megabytes of data read from the webserver.  The server barely even blinked under all the traffic.

The only bottleneck was the DSL line, not the server.  I learned that the DSL line can handle quite a number of users before it clogs up.  This morning, there were 80 concurrent visitors to this site and I was still able to get streaming stock quotes without any problems.  The only problem I had was last night at 12:00am.  I looked at the router and saw there was a ton of activity on the WAN, but I couldn't access any websites from my DSL line.  I thought somebody was hacking my computer or doing a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack so I rebooted the server.  Turns out that there weren't any hackers, but instead, a ton of people were trying to access my site at the same time and totally bogged it down.  The site was still reachable, but very very slow.  From my server, I saw 170 concurrent visitors to my website.  Within 1 hour, over 450 people had visited.  This may not sound like much for a typical webserver, but remember this site is a small site hosted on a 128k DSL line.  By the way, all those visitors came from the Netherlands.  Super cool!  I guess a website over there had put up my article and everybody came over at the same time.

That's really cool how websites transcend land boundaries.  If you are visiting from a different country, heck, if you're visiting from this country, please stop by this thread and write which country you're visiting from.  I have to keep reminding myself that the Internet is truly international.

There is a new entry in our Member Sites.  Very cool looking websites!

I added 3 more speed tests in the Tests/Tools section so you can test your connection to your hearts desire.

I backed off the server cpu from 380 Mhz down to 350 Mhz.  There wasn't any problem with 380 Mhz for about a week, but I decided that I would settle for a 17 Mhz overclock.

April 1, 2001
Today we start the fair month of April and it feels good.  Nothing much going on around here except we now have our newest article up: Network Card Roundup - Which is the Best Network Card?.  Check it out and see how the different network cards rate.

On a different subject, I've been having problems testing the phoneline networking cards (for the phoneline bridge article) because my other test computer which is an older computer (with 3 pc and 3 isa slots) has run out of pci slots.  I'm going to go dig up another computer to test on, so this article might be a while in the making.

BTW, did you know that it was snowing over here in Los Angeles today?  Weirdest thing!

April Fools!
 

Take Me Home!