Normally a conventional home network is setup by purchasing a "router" by linksys or d-link or somebody, and it is the dhcp server, hands out IP addresses, shares the internet, etc.. All in one package that does everything.
that's great but it doesn't scale up to 50 computers easily.
Alternatively (I think, correct me if I'm wrong), you can have just a commercial switch, like a 3com superstack, or some gigabit switch. It connects to a windows server machine which has two NIC cards, one for internet, one for the switch. Then you configure the server machine to be the DHCP server, to route internet, as the DNS, the firewall and everything like that.
Okay, so questions:
1) I'm told if at all possible, setting things up in hardware is far superior to doing it in software with an operating system. Is that true?
2) The hardware I've seen that does routing seems to be pretty primitive. Can't handle more than 15-20 users. What kind of commercial grade hardware routers exist that ARE designed to handle large networks?
3) So is having a windows server sharing internet, being the dhcp server and ultimately doing the router's job a scaleable and reliable way of setting up a medium sized network?
4) How much traffic can you expect a reasonably decent desktop-machine-running-as
-the-serve
r to be able to handle with this kind of setup?
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