My dad wants to use his PowerMac 8100 as an IPMasq gateway between the cable modem and the rest of the computers in the house. All the computers/printers have 10/100 Ethernet and are connected with Cat5. The 8100’s onboard Ethernet is 10Base-2 (ThinNet) so he added a 10/100 card to that machine so it could be on the rest of the network. Naturally, an IPMasq gateway would require two network interfaces, and the cable modem will have a 10/100 interface. So, will he have to buy a second 10/100 card for the 8100 (not a big deal) or is there an adaptor of some sort to convert 10Base-2 to 10/100? Are the protocols even compatable?
10base2 (aka thinnet or cheapernet) will not handle 100 Mbits. You can get a tranceiver to convert to 10baseT (which you could then connect to the modem), or (probably less expensive) a second network card.
Keep in mind that your cable modem will max out at somewhat less than 10Mbit/second throughput (the best I’ve ever seen on mine is about 4 Mb/s, (i.e. ~400 KB/s)), so that extra bandwidth on the network card won’t help you any.
Or you could just go for a Linksys Cable/DSL dedicated router for $100, which has two 10/100 ports, one for the LAN and one for the WAN (i.e. cable modem). You don’t need any additional network cards and it uses a hell of a lot less electricity, so in the long run will probably be cheaper [than leaving the PowerMac on all the time].
For more information, check out the usenet group comp.dcom.modems.cable (apologies if the link doesn’t work properly - we don’t have access to a news server here at work so I can’t test it) or a do a Yahoo search on Cable Modems - there’s tons of info.
[Or you could just go for a Linksys Cable/DSL dedicated router for $100, which has two 10/100 ports, one for the LAN and one for the WAN (i.e. cable modem). You don’t need any additional network cards and it uses a hell of a lot less electricity, so in the long run will probably be cheaper [than leaving the PowerMac on all the time].
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Go with the lynksys router (i recomend the 4 port model) it will not hog resources and only require 1 (10 or 100 mbs) lan card in each computer. You can even mix and match 10 and 100 cards. Also the router acts as the onlyh externally reconizable device and acts as a firewall.