downriver, Heat is a real issue for me also. I've only got 5 monitors, i'd like to add another 2 but it would be like working in a sauna. I'm in the tropics so you can imagine what it's like after-hours when they turn the A/C off in my building. Forget about it. I turn individual monitors off when not in use and I have an industrial strength fan. I'm also considering getting a free standing A/C unit for my office - but noise then becomes an issue. bolter
i'm surprised more people with multi-PC setups don't use something like Synergy to get away from having a mouse/keyboard for each machine. i guess it is just a matter of personal preference .. take care o
I did use Synergy and loved it until I went to a dual ISP, dual router, dual NIC setup. I really like the setup for reliability and bandwidth, but Synergy will not work anymore. Something about seeing two networks causes it to fail.
will synergy work for 2 seperate computers running off 1 router? whats the difference between synergy and a kvm switch?
Synergy is pure software that allows a single keyboard to control all PC's on a networks as one giant virtual screen. No physical switch needed. Just a single router. And it's free. Just google synergy.
are you using dual ISP for load-balancing and diverse paths or is one primary, the other a backup? either way, it seems you would be able to have a dual ISP connection via a single router. or at least be able to use one router for all your machines and use either policy routing or path filtering to force certain traffic over one ISP connection (out of router1) and push the other traffic out to the other ISP (onto and out of router 2). anyway, just curious about your setup and network requirements ... take care o btw: to the poster looking for info on Synergy http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
My main goals were to get more bandwidth and to provide redundancy. I initially was considering a dual WAN router but on one of the discussions here SideShowBob talked me out of it and steered me to a dual NIC/dual router approach. Beyond losing Synergy I have zero complaints. Windows XP switches over on failure in about a second. I'm totally shocked that XP handles this so well. And my understanding is that dual WAN routers do not switch nearly that fast. In addition, it was never clear (and still isn't) on how a dual WAN router handles secure connections - does it try to divide the traffic over the two WAN's? If so, that could be a problem. The more reading I did, the more it seemed like a dual WAN router is great for gamers and maybe not so great for traders. Since I've never used a dual WAN router, I have no hard proof to back this statement up. In the end I had someone (who trades) telling me the dual router/dual NIC setup works great and that the dual WAN router sucked for them. So I went with his recommendation and have been happy with it. The only catch that got me in this current setup is that the 2nd NIC card you install becomes the "default" card that XP will try to use first. Once I had that figured out things ran super smooth.
instead of going threw all that i have a 8 station setup using 2 quad ergotron stands with 4 dell 2001 fp ultrasharps as the bases and 4 dell 1907 fp's on the top. i use a kvm switch to move between computers. i also have a dsl system set up in my office if the cable modem goes down. i've had a cable modem 2 1/2 yearts and it's been down 1 times and i've had dsl 6 years and it's been down maybe 4 times during trading. the frequency of the systems going down is so small i say no need to have a auto switchover ystem.
Consider yourself fortunate on your outages. Also you need to define what an outage is. For me anything lasting longer than a few seconds is an outage as it disrupts my trading, particularly the automated systems. Unless you have a setup that automatically switches over on failure you may not realize how many short outages you actually have.