From: "Adam Flinton" 

Ummm.....

OK machine sits under stairs plugged into the adsl router/hub. The ADSL
router/hub does most of the routing stuff & port forwarding. It is a
dumb box which just does as it's told.

The PC does additional things such as firewall, DNS, remote access (ssh),
mail (fetchmail & postfix + IMAP) & http server. It just needs to
sit there quietly not using much energy & doing those tasks. The only
ports forwarded from the router are 80 (for http) & 23 (for ssh). They
are forwarded to this machine.

It does not run x automatically but can run X & is mostly
"gui'zed" by VNC (& then only periodically).

A 333 MHz beastie with 96 MB of ram can easily do that (it's not serving
http for Yahoo or anything).

What is happening is that I'm going to run out of room on the thing if I
want to serve family photos from it if I include large files for people who
want to print off the photo in good quality. The better the photo quality
the higher the file size sort of thing.

If it had either a firewire or USB2 port on it I could simply pop down to
the shops & "mount a new volume". Both bus speeds would be
easily capable of handling the load as that would be set by the upload
speed granted to me by my telco/isp.

If I had a 100 mbit upload speed & a bunch of people with 100Mbit
download speeds then that might be an issue but...that's not the world as
we know it for the home connection.

What I want is to be able to simply & easily upgrade the storage via an
external bus.


Adam

"David N. Barnett"  wrote in message
news:cf02uuck4r8t174caiblp18mk2qep2jccq{at}4ax.com...
> On Sun, 24 Nov 2002 11:42:29 -0000, "Adam Flinton"
>  wrote in message :
>
> | I am thinking of replacing my old 333Mhz laptop which does the under the
> | stairs always on bit as it's running out of disk space so...I was
wondering
> | if anyone knows if Laptop makers are doing USB2 yet as that would seem
ideal
> | i.e. Laptop plus a stack of external USB2 drives for "space
expansion".
>
> Why would you want to use a laptop for such an application?  I doubt
> that many new laptops have cooling systems adequate to manage a P4 or
> Athlon in an always-on situation.  Not to mention that laptops are
> twice as expensive as an equivalent desktop system, and have worse
> performance...  This does not appear to be an appropriate use of
> technology.
>
> --dnb

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