Creating a Functional Network for a Radio Station?

E-bot & Ro-bert asks: "I volunteer for my campus radio station and, as the only techy there, I've been asked to help design their new network. We're on a very fixed budget and we're working with win98 PCs. The network needs to provide the ability to simultaneously stream and transfer large files (uncompressed WAV data) w/o interruptions to the stream. I know their current idea of using a simple hub and connecting all the computers won't work, but I'm drawing a blank on what to suggest. The specifics: Two of 6 Win98 PCs need to have the ability to broadcast audio data from any source on the network. The other 4 of 6 computers must be able to transfer files on the network w/o taking too much bandwidth away from the streams. I'm thinking of QoS, but how should it be implemented? What does the slashdot community look for, and suggest, in making a high-bandwidth network?"

Re:Start with the network

[anticypher]

To start, there are no 100Mbit hubs, the very spec for 100BaseTX requires a switching function. The cheapest 10/100 hub/switches are just that, a 10BaseT hub for the ports in 10 mode, and a 100BaseTX switch with one port internally going to the 10BaseT hub.

Don't get a cheap taiwanese 10/100 switch. They don't really have more than 100 Mbps of switching capacity. Once two ports are communicating, all the other ports are being buffered. As soon as you have a higher bandwidth than about 5-10Mbps streaming connection between two ports, you will see drop and loss problems on all the remaining ports. Avoid these cheap switches at all costs, they will only cause you headaches down the road. Certainly avoid the no-name ones that look just like major name brand models, because they are the brand name models which have a problem (or several) and thus are rebadged and sold for cheaper. Even if you can get a warantee replacement when it dies in a few weeks, the replacement will also have a fault.

The best bet for cheap used switches right now is Foundry. There are tons of used Foundry WorkGroupServers on eBay and sitting around used kit warehouses. I've seen people pick them up for under $100. With the latest firmware (i.e. from 2001), they'll do vlans, rate-limiting per port, and can support multiple, simultaneous, 100Mbps streams. Plus they have SNMP support, so you can set up MRTG or cacti and watch how much bandwidth each machine is using.

Don't skimp on the network switch or the cabling, you'll only look bad when it all goes wrong (which Murphy says will be at the worst possible moment, but you know that by now or will learn the hard way soon enough :-)

the AC