Comments on: Dual nic laptop mod

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 17:00:12 +0000

brilliant work,very tidy looks like it was meant to be like that.

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 05:10:22 +0000

Great job.

Clarkconnect (the distro he is using) is really sweet. Its a fully functional router, firewall, proxy server, content filter, packet shaper, sql server, samba server and ftp server that installs in a few clicks. The best part is that it has a slick web interface to adjust the settings for pretty much anything on the server. I have a box running it at home that has been up for about 6 months now.

By: strider_mt2k

strider_mt2k — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:03:13 +0000

Oh, and work on that spelling, you hotshot network expert you.

By: strider_mt2k

strider_mt2k — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:02:12 +0000

Alex, just give it up man.

Quit while you’re behind.

By: TGBM

TGBM — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 21:48:24 +0000

nice clean hack,

i think the point was not that he was getting something done, but that he was making it look *very* nice.

By: nullgel

nullgel — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:26:04 +0000

Agreed. I’d take a serial port over a parallel port any day. So much of our i.t. gear requires a nice db9 serial telnet session to get going. Its annoying to have to carry a USB to serial adapter everywhere. Whine, whine, whine. I guess I shouldn’t have chosen a dell XPS laptop for work… are we O.T. yet?

By: Ajax 4Hire

Ajax 4Hire — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 16:15:45 +0000

cool hack.
I agree, this is exactly what you want for a router.
The closer you bolt the Network to your OS the better.

USB, PCMCIA, external Ethernet HUB all move the network farther away from your Router OS.

I too lament the addition of a useless telephone modem on my laptop. Even more odd is the fact that it (IBM Thinkpad) has a Parallel Port but no Serial Port. Talk about useless interfaces, do people still use the Parallel Port? Yeah old software dongles and it is great for a block of Programmable I/O, but really who uses the Parallel port?

By: strider_mt2k

strider_mt2k — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:41:37 +0000

pcmcia was also flaky on his machine as well as usb.
(sigh)

*it was one of the reasons why he pursued this hack in the first place!!!

it actually improved the usefulness of an otherwise less than useful machine _with existing hardware issues_.

what exactly is the problem here?

it's pretty well known that independent nics allow for other, better functionality for applications such as his.
he was very clear about these functions not being supported by other means.

anyone having any problem whatsoever with this hack should get their head examined

it would have been cool to do even if it was only for shits and giggles, ya dimwits!

By: colin smith

colin smith — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 08:24:23 +0000

Hey guys! Let’s all bash a well-executed hack because we think we know how they could’ve better used their own time!

Yeah, that’ll make us cool. I can’t wait to tell my friends at lunch.

By: atrain

atrain — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 07:38:55 +0000

ok, if not usb then why not pcmcia or something? heck, why did it have to be nicely integrated at all? The machine was left in a big pile of cables and boxes, what difference does one more add?

By: mike

mike — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 07:25:12 +0000

very cool and that would make a good lan party server

——
black hole
zanzabar@tdgon.com

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:55:42 +0000

Andrew,
the usb nics were unstable on his alienware machine

By: Andrew Pollack

Andrew Pollack — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:04:12 +0000

Not to defend Alex, who clearly misses the point of a good hack — but it could be done with a usb nic. Still, a dual internal nic laptop would be nice. I have a linux vm that I load which provides dhcp & nat routing services while I connect to the net over EVDO — which amounts to the same thing for the most part.

By: atrain

atrain — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 03:49:08 +0000

I borrowed a laptop from somebody, and the nic was bashed in and doesn’t work. Not sure whether its the port something worse. Shows up under linux though.

I’m considering doing something like this (but will have to be pulled in through pcmcia, stupid dell)

By: nullgel

nullgel — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 03:34:10 +0000

I’ve always wished that my laptop came with two NICs instead of the completely useless (to me since 1998) modem. I do a LOT of network programming and, for testing, this mod would really come in handy. I doubt the company would like me to soldering on this thing (not that I could do the fine work anyway) but I might consider trying it on my older personal laptop. Good job.