Using What Works - Company Business and Marketing

Home Office Computing, July, 2000 by Marshall F. Lager

An old PC does network duty for a modern Mac

"LEARN WHAT IS USEFUL AND DISCARD the rest" is sound advice--in any environment. And while Bruce Lee had martial arts in mind when he said it, the principle applies equally well to Earl Hall's home network.

Hall, a Unix network administrator for the Chicago office of Fiserv, a financial processing services firm, has learned to take what's useful from three different computing platforms. He uses a Power Mac G3 running OS 9.0, as well as a Pentium/60 with Windows 95 and Linux dual-booted. "I had this old Gateway box I saw no reason to throw out," Hall recalls.

Hall uses Windows for Web browsing and sharing the Internet, and Linux for dialing in to Fiserv's corporate servers. Because he prefers it to the PC, Hall uses the G3 for most of his offline work. But when Hall brought in DSL service, things changed--he says he realized he needed a network to share the DSL line, but "didn't want to pull a lot of cable to do it."

One day inspiration struck with a little help from Web radio. "While listening to The Mac Show (www.macshowlive.com), someone mentioned Farallon's HomeLine Ethernet-to-PNA adapters," he recalls. Hall ordered the adapters online, and two days later his home phone-line network was up and running.

As a network administrator, Hall must be available for troubleshooting at a moment's notice to protect clients' finances. "I use the Pentium in the basement to monitor the network and make easy tweaks when I'm home," he explains, "while Gleycy [Lavenholi, Hall's wife] uses the Mac upstairs in the study." As a corporate travel agent, Lavenholi often brings spreadsheets home or goes online to watch for new deals.

Although Hall had to negotiate the quirks of three different operating systems, he reports only good experiences with his network. The biggest problem? "Configuring Windows for the network was annoying," he says. "You have to reboot after every change you make, and that got really tedious. Still, I had it configured in less than 2 hours.

"Between Linux's small appetite for RAM and CPU resources, and the speed of our DSL line, the P60 is all I need," Hall says. "We'd share a printer, but we already own two."

These days, Hall and his wife have it easy with their separate computing tasks. Hall's hardware firewall from BeadleNet (now owned by WatchGuard) performs well, and he reports almost no slowdown while sharing DSL over the network. "It's a little strange," Hall says. "When Gleycy and I are online at the same time, each machine gets the full 416Kbps."

The couple plans to update and expand their home network at a leisurely pace as their needs change. "We've been thinking about swapping the Pentium for a G4, and possibly adding a laptop to the mix," Hall explains. But those are projects for another day.

"We'll see what we need, and add it when we can," adds Hall.

SNAPSHOT: Earl Hall

OCCUPATION: Unix administrator for Fiserv, a financial processing services company

HOME NETWORK: Two Farallon HomeLine Ethernet adapters ($100 each; 800-613-4954, www.farallon.com), BeadleNet SOHO2000 firewall (no longer available)

COMPUTERS: Apple Power Mac G3, Gateway Pentium/60