Creating a Functional Network for a Radio Station?

E-bot & Ro-bert asks: "I volunteer for my campus radio station and, as the only techy there, I've been asked to help design their new network. We're on a very fixed budget and we're working with win98 PCs. The network needs to provide the ability to simultaneously stream and transfer large files (uncompressed WAV data) w/o interruptions to the stream. I know their current idea of using a simple hub and connecting all the computers won't work, but I'm drawing a blank on what to suggest. The specifics: Two of 6 Win98 PCs need to have the ability to broadcast audio data from any source on the network. The other 4 of 6 computers must be able to transfer files on the network w/o taking too much bandwidth away from the streams. I'm thinking of QoS, but how should it be implemented? What does the slashdot community look for, and suggest, in making a high-bandwidth network?"

Comments

pls think. thx.

[adolf]

Cool.

I always suspected that whenver I've had trouble handling networked media files, that the problem really was that the network was just too bloody fast.

I'm so glad that NetLimiter will finally slow things down to such an extent that I can reliably transfer a WAV recording.

Too bad it's less than one-third the speed of my fucking cable modem.

Talk about pathetic and absurd. It's a stupid idea, and you know it. More bandwidth to the world than across the desk? Fucking-a NOT.

Now: How about spending $25 on a cheap, fast ethernet switch? Not only is it plainly a better solution to the problem, but it's WAY FUCKING CHEAPER than buying a bunch of copies of NetLimiter, and doesn't involve even an iota of a software adjustment, it's cheaper, and it's existance easily understood by any technical people who will appear later on. Oh, and it's faster as greased shit and is plug-and-play when installed in place of the existing 10base-T hub.

Did I mention that it's cheaper to just buy a switch and be done?

(Are you some kind of schill for Netlimiter?)