If you are setting up a router, get a real cheap butt CISCO router. Shouldn't cost you more than 100 bucks. However messing around VPT trunking is a fun experience and you can learn quite a lot from that.

Does anyone know if Linux DHCP servers can do reservations using a MAC address like Windows servers can? For those who are unfamiliar the reservation lets DHCP give a machine the same IP each time as if its static but set at the server level instead of machine level.

Does anyone know if it is possible to set an IP on my HP 2524 (J4813A) without the console cable? The manual suggests it is not but it seems HP used a propriety ping configuration for the console port so the serial cable I ordered will not work. I can get one in a couple of weeks but until then I wanted to actually play with the switch. I was able to use it last night with no configuration just plugging PCs in for a small LAN but I wanted to dig into the options of it.

Not likely, but how is it set up? Try Telnet?

Last time I dealth with HP switches we used SSH but they already had IP addresses. It isn't a huge deal at this point as it works as a basic switch for the moment and I am getting the adapter next week.

I suppose you are setting it up like this? WAN --RJ45--> home router --RJ45--> switch --console(serial)--> PC or whatever?

A couple weeks ago I got an HP console cable (female serial on both ends) from a former coworker and used the USB to Serial cable I had purchased with the switch to try to console into the switch I bought but its not working. The cable is set to COM1 in my device manager but when I try to connect with PuTTY to the switch it doesn't do anything, no errors but no success either. I can't think what I am doing wrong and I checked with the person I got the cable from and he has no ideas. Anyone else have any suggestions?

I have a 500GB external HDD and 2 computers with Windows 7. Is it possible to make the external drive a shared drive so that both of my computers can access the files on it and dump files to it?

Have you tried fiddling with the speed? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_port#Speed. Looked in the manual? It may tell you the specific requirements needed. Have you seen if there is specific software for it? Sometimes there something proprietary being sent that only their program will pick up on.


Yeah, it's really simple and can be done in a couple of ways

1. The cheapest: If one of the two computers is on all the time, plug it into that computer. Right-click the drive letter and select "Properties". Go to the sharing tab, go advanced sharing, allow sharing. Click the "Permissions" button on the same window and allow all permissions. To disable the password requirement you will need to go in Advanced Sharing Settings (Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Network and Sharing Center\Advanced sharing settings) and turn off password protected sharing.

2. The Simplest: Get a Plug computer like a http://pogoplug.com/devices. Dead-simple to set up, but limited in capabilities and requires proprietary software to connect to it (even on the same LAN) short of hacking it.

3. The most expandable: Build yourself a NAS. You can expand the space as you need it and add other features with ease

A simple ~$150 NAS:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121442

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147131

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148192

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200294

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139246

+ *nix distro of your choice (like the crafted-just-for-this-purpose http://www.freenas.org/)

You can get a cross-over version of the standard CAT-5 ethernet cable to connect two devices without needing an intervening hub, switch or whatever: they're rather handy. Dunno about USB: "possibly", but I do all my networking with CAT-5.

Yes, they can. I use ISC DHCP (albeit on my FreeBSD server) which does just this.

Edit: http://www.isc.org/products/DHCP/.

Edit 2: example configuration, to be less obtuse about it; it has two fixed MAC address allocations and a general pool:

ddns-update-style none;log-facility local7;subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { use-host-decl-names on; option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0; option broadcast-address 192.168.1.255; option routers 192.168.1.254; option domain-name "vssnet"; option domain-name-servers 192.168.1.1; next-server 192.168.1.1; group {  filename "/pxelinux.0";  host toaster {   hardware ethernet xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;   fixed-address 192.168.1.7;  }  host aga {   hardware ethernet xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;   fixed-address aga.vssnet;   option root-path "teapot:/ws/aga";   #option root-options "nfsv4,rdirplus,hard,intr";   filename "aga/boot/pxeboot";  } } pool {  default-lease-time 600;  max-lease-time 7200;  range 192.168.1.189 192.168.1.220; }}

Things like filename, root-path and so on you can probably ignore since they're for net-booting Linux systems (and discless Linux is frustratingly lethargic anyway, so I'm probably going to ditch that as an idea.) 192.168.1.1 is both my DHCP and DNS server, just to be clear.

I know Putty works as we used it this past summer where I worked and I have tried both speeds of 9600 and 115200 and accoridng to the manual it will detect the speed and adjust accordingly so it supports a pretty good size speed range so I am confused as to what the issue actually is.

I wouldn't rely too much on automatic speed detection: my experience is that it's not terribly reliable. Ideally, you'd need to find out what's the actual speed setting as well as the byte size, number of stop bits, parity and so on; though I've found the most common problem with serial connections not responding is DTE/DCE incompatibility. And that's something that's always next to impossible to predict, except that it's most likely to be one that doesn't work with the cable you have to hand. If you can find a handy "gender bender" plug that swaps the transmit and receive pins, it might give some enlightenment. (Or it may not: sadly, there are so many parameters for such a simple connection type...)

Edit: actually that's the plug that's a male-female adapter or vice versa, but at least I said what I meant! Blimey, the wrong plug type was also a regular nightmare...