I feel compelled to respond to this, even though it'll never receive the attention of the mods because the story is yesterday's.
I've spent a year working in a rural East African hospital, where I helped them rationalise their IT systems and build a site-wide IP phone network, among other things. One of the biggest problems we faced was well-meaning western donors sending old computers and IT hardware!
- If the only computers you can buy in an East African capital city have SATA connections, why would we want your old IDE drives?
- If the wireless networking gear we're using is all working at 802.11g, why would we want your old 802.11b gear?
- If we can't use the stuff, what do we do with it? Throw it into a hole in the ground, where the heavy metals in the components will leech into the water table? Burn it, polluting the local environment? At least in the US or Europe, it'll be disposed of sensibly.
I know it sounds like a good idea; I know it feels better than putting it in the trash. But often palming off your old gear onto a community in the developing world causes more problems than it solves.
I've done a lot of work in this field, working for a major UK radio broadcaster.
If money permits, keep your audio network (with your playout machines and audio server on) separate from your office network (with office machines, printers etc). You can either use VLANs on a decent managed switch or better still have two completely separate networks connected by a machine / router to allow you to put audio on the server.
We had a vested interest in this because our audio servers were often running netware and we didn't always want to route IPX on our office segments. This notwithstanding, it'll still improve reliability of your audio playout infrastructure.
As other posters have pointed out, a 100Mbps switch will be more than adequate for pulling linear 16bit 44.1kHz WAV data from machine to machine.
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I feel compelled to respond to this, even though it'll never receive the attention of the mods because the story is yesterday's.
I've spent a year working in a rural East African hospital, where I helped them rationalise their IT systems and build a site-wide IP phone network, among other things. One of the biggest problems we faced was well-meaning western donors sending old computers and IT hardware!
- If the only computers you can buy in an East African capital city have SATA connections, why would we want your old IDE drives?
- If the wireless networking gear we're using is all working at 802.11g, why would we want your old 802.11b gear?
- If we can't use the stuff, what do we do with it? Throw it into a hole in the ground, where the heavy metals in the components will leech into the water table? Burn it, polluting the local environment? At least in the US or Europe, it'll be disposed of sensibly.
I know it sounds like a good idea; I know it feels better than putting it in the trash. But often palming off your old gear onto a community in the developing world causes more problems than it solves.
I've done a lot of work in this field, working for a major UK radio broadcaster.
If money permits, keep your audio network (with your playout machines and audio server on) separate from your office network (with office machines, printers etc). You can either use VLANs on a decent managed switch or better still have two completely separate networks connected by a machine / router to allow you to put audio on the server.
We had a vested interest in this because our audio servers were often running netware and we didn't always want to route IPX on our office segments. This notwithstanding, it'll still improve reliability of your audio playout infrastructure.
As other posters have pointed out, a 100Mbps switch will be more than adequate for pulling linear 16bit 44.1kHz WAV data from machine to machine.