On Fri, 8 Sept 2023 at 14:49, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <[email protected]> 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/ [email protected] --- Post to this mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
