Network Tweak

I made a change to my network this morning that I thought I'd share with you.

My two machines are networked wirelessly (802.11b) in the following way:

ADSL Router
Wireless NIC: 192.168.0.1

Desktop (Keyclone Controller)
Wireless NIC: 192.168.0.2

Laptop (Keyclone Slave)
Wireless NIC: 192.168.0.3

Any packets sent from the controller to the slave have to make a wireless hop to the gateway and then another wireless hop to the laptop. This is a fairly high latency journey.

So I thought I might be able to make use of the wired NICs that my desktop and laptop have, particularly as the machines sit side by side when I'm playing so yesterday I bought myself a Cat5e crossover cable and set up a second network directly connecting the two machines so they now look like this:

ADSL Router
Wireless NIC: 192.168.0.1

Desktop (Keyclone Controller)
Wireless NIC: 192.168.0.2
Wired NIC: 192.168.1.2

Laptop (Keyclone Slave)
Wireless NIC: 192.168.0.3
Wired NIC: 192.168.1.3

I reconfigured keyclone on the desktop to connect to the laptop using the 192.168.1.3 address instead of the 192.168.0.3 address so now the link between the two has much less latency :)

I ran a quick test (100 pings) and these were the results:

Wireless network: Average latency 83ms, Packet loss 14%
Wired network: Average latency 0ms, Packet loss 0%

Wired networking on stationary computers is usually the best way to go. Higher security, less setup issues, better latency & bandwidth. Gigabit Ethernet FTW.