Wired or wireless network for a graphics lab?

On May 10, 2007, at 1:09 PM, curtis corlew wrote:

> My graphics lab of 30 eMacs is being moved for a year, then moved
> again later. Our IT staff asked me if running wireless would be a
> good thing for me. I would make their lives easier as they wouldn't
> have a wire a room just for a year.
>
> Should I say yes or no? Am I at 802.11b, g or n with the eMacs? They
> have no cards now.
>
> How many Airport Base Stations would I need? 2? 3?

If you're editing your files directly off of the server (and believe
me, regardless of what you tell your students, they'll TRY to), I
think you'll find anything short of 802.11n to be too slow. However,
an 802.11g network is sufficient for copying your work files to the
local computer, working on them, and then saving/backing them up to
the server.

--Nik

On 10-May-2007, at 13:09, curtis corlew wrote:
> Should I say yes or no? Am I at 802.11b, g or n with the eMacs? They
> have no cards now.

You will need to get 802.11b cards for the emacs, and that can be an
issue as they are in very short supply and no longer made.

Might be cheaper to wire up, even for just one year.

However, if you get the cards, wifi should work just fine.

> How many Airport Base Stations would I need? 2? 3?

Single room? 1 should be fine.

However, you might want to do something like get three base stations
and divide the room up into 3 groups of ten machines for each base
station. That's probably what I would do.

> Should I say yes or no? Am I at 802.11b, g or n with the eMacs? They
> have no cards now.

Honestly if there's no cards in the eMacs already, running the wire
would be far easier, not to mention cheaper -- if it's only for a
year, and it's moving again, then throwing out a network switch per
table and covering up any wiring that runs over the floor with duct
tape and/or rubber wire ducts made for that purpose should be
adequate. No need to rewire the room if it's not going to be
permanent, if you can get that by the powers that be.

For any teaching/demonstration/presentation application the golden
rule is to reduce the number of things that can go wrong. Wired
'goes wrong' a whole lot less than wireless.

I'd ask if they can run temporary wires over the table/desktops --
it'd be a lot faster than installing, setting up and configuring
wireless on 30 computers.

M

> On 10-May-2007, at 13:09, curtis corlew wrote:
>> Should I say yes or no? Am I at 802.11b, g or n with the eMacs? They
>> have no cards now.
>
> You will need to get 802.11b cards for the emacs, and that can be an
> issue as they are in very short supply and no longer made.

Or you could go with a wireless Ethernet bridge, like the LinkSys
WET54G. About $90 each, readily available. Easy to set up, decent speed.
Cheaper than running cable, and you could save the packaging to eBay
them for much of their original value when you were finished with them.

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