On Fri, 8 Sept 2023 at 14:49, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
More to your point, it may be convenient for your router to have more than two ethernet ports. Giles' box only has two, yours and mine have four. (Giles's box sure is cute.)
Common wisdom has it that USB ethernet dongles are not always stable 24/7.---
This is a subject I know way too much about - which means you've triggered a story that can be skipped by those not interested. The main point: I've never found a totally stable USB-to-Ethernet dongle - and I've tried quite a few. I'm fairly hardcore about having my computers connected to the network via wires rather than WiFi. I do use WiFi occasionally, to sit on the balcony or the couch - but the wireless router is on a physical switch which is off most of the time. Which means I've become very familiar with USB-to-Ethernet dongles and their quirky behaviour. The most stable I've ever dealt with are the Apple-branded ones attached to Apple computers (they're pretty good attached to non-Apple computers as well, although I rarely use them that way). But Linux computers with USB-to-Ethernet dongles are never totally stable. I would say I get a couple minutes of network drop-outs per day (across multiple brands). Which isn't a problem when I'm not in front of the computer (they're clients, not servers), but when you're using Barrier to use one computer's mouse and keyboard to control another computer, a network outage knocks you off the second computer completely. Sometimes these outages resolve themselves, occasionally (rarely) I have to run `dhclient` by hand on the machine with the dongle. I've never dug into the logs to figure out why. I have multiple USB3-to-Ethernet dongles: - one "Amazon Basics" - fairly good, but probably the most drop-outs? - two Anker "Unibody Aluminum" - slightly better - three Orico 3-port USB hub + Ethernet - these are noticeably more stable (still not perfect) and, because of the added USB ports, more useful - absolute worst: Belkin USB-C "docking bay" thingy: the Ethernet port on this bounced every 30 seconds to 1 minute, totally unusable (and of course being a "docking bay" it cost much more than the others). I ended up plugging one of the Ankers into a USB port on the docking bay! I've never seen this instability with built-in Ethernet ports: they work or they don't, end of story. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com