Hardware

Hello.
I have a Dell Optiplex 790 USFF. (http://goo.gl/i0TSY)
It was given to me but its not good enough for any day-to-day business. Great as linux-box dough, but there is one mayor feature missing from it.
It is the smalles desktop computers they have, so any room for "useless" stuff is removed. Like PCI-ports.

So my question is if you guys know any way i can expand this machine with one extra network-port. Is there for example a usb-to-network-adapter that would do the job? Or are there any hacks out there i could try out?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Hello.
I have a Dell Optiplex 790 USFF. (http://goo.gl/i0TSY)
It was given to me but its not good enough for any day-to-day business. Great as linux-box dough, but there is one mayor feature missing from it.
It is the smalles desktop computers they have, so any room for "useless" stuff is removed. Like PCI-ports.

So my question is if you guys know any way i can expand this machine with one extra network-port. Is there for example a usb-to-network-adapter that would do the job? Or are there any hacks out there i could try out?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Your best bet may be to get a VLAN capable switch and use VLANs to create more ports.  The 790 almost certainly has a Gigabit NIC, so you shouldn't have any performance issues unless you're pushing a -lot- of traffic.  Netgear makes some decent VLAN capable switches that aren't all that expensive.  Or you may be able to find some older, bigger, more "enterprise" style switches that support VLANs for fairly cheap.  It's pretty common to find older switches with a couple Gb ports and the rest 10/100 for not much at all.

While a few USB NICs may "work" with m0n0wall, I often hear that they can be pretty flaky at times.  Also, USB NIC manufacturers seem to be bad about switching out the underlying hardware without changing the model number very much (there may be a fully different chip between a V1 and a V1.1 model that may take a completely different driver, for instance.)  Speed shouldn't be a big deal for most people, though.  Assuming it's the only thing taking up any real bandwidth on the USB bus, USB 2.0 seems to top out around 33MB/s (at least to storage, I'd imagine a good USB NIC may be able to get similar performance.)

Actually, not that I know anything about your business, but a 790 is not good enough for day-to-day business?  It's at least an i5 and can take at least 8GB of ram (the spec says 16GB across the whole line, but the USFF only has 2 DIMM slots where the others have 4, maybe it can take a pair of 8GB Dimms.)  I mean, I think it'll even run dual monitors (1 over VGA another over Display Port, might need a DP to VGA or DVI adapter.)

I would imagine that unless you're doing something heavily graphically intensive (and I mean heavy 3d, video editing that may require a specific card or something), that machine could be a plenty decent standard work desktop (assuming it has or can be bumped up to enough RAM.)

Great! That seems like the best option by far!
Do you think GS108T-200 would do the trick? (http://goo.gl/1KdOa)

Yes i see your point, and you are completely right, but i meant more in the sence that it doesnt fit in with my workflow. I use mostly mac for work, and linux for servers, and this computer just sits there without anything to do. until now

If the port number suits Your needs according to the specification i think it should get the job done.
Just a little notice these additional products run on proprietary software and require proprietary software for configuration and maintenance.

As Јаневски alludes to, while that switch would probably work well, its management may be difficult for you if all the rest of your machines are all Macs.  The management for that switch is through a Windows application.

That is absolutely a  good point.
I have searched around to se how it is with this switch, and it looks like it has a web interface. That should mean that it would give me controll over it dont you think?
Are there any other switches, maybe some hackerfriendly ones, that you would recomend?

That is absolutely a  good point.
I have searched around to se how it is with this switch, and it looks like it has a web interface. That should mean that it would give me controll over it dont you think?
Are there any other switches, maybe some hackerfriendly ones, that you would recomend?

OpenRRCP could help.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/openrrcp/wiki/RRCP
Here's current list of supported hardware.
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/openrrcp/wiki/Hardware

I do not think you can get thorough the initial config with only one nic.  Even with v-lan.

I do not think you can get thorough the initial config with only one nic.  Even with v-lan.

Sure you can, the first thing it should ask you is if you want to set up VLAN's, regardless of how many nics you have.

I just tested it on a VM, just to be double sure.  Gave it a single E1000 NIC and the first thing it asked was if I wanted to setup VLAN's, like normal.  It saved the config just fine.

I would use that hardware as a linux desktop or linux server and use a small mini-itx (with atom cpu) or alix board as a router. The alix/mini-itx will save you electricity. Just a suggestion.

Check the Dell website, you can add this card to the box to have a second rj-45 port: Broadcom NetXtreme 10/100/1000 PCIe card