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New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

jeffgeerling.com

101–110 of 384 posts

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#101
I've had such terrible success with usb-ethernet adapters on linux, to the point where wifi is usually much more performant. The main issue is connection drops. You can see it easily in gnome where the ethernet connection constantly drops and comes back up. It's so frequent though that even scp-ing a medium-sized file is likely to fail or stall. Hardware is a Framework 13 3rd gen laptop.

Is this just my hardware? It's hard to imagine these issues would be so prevalent with how many people use these on linux...

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#103
post #9

Is it also possible to power a laptop through those adapters? PoE++ can deliver up to 100W of power, more than enough for most laptops.

The idea of a POE Mac mini makes me happy. It would be a nice way of power cycling it from the switch, tidier than the smart plug I have. https://hackaday.com/2023/08/14/adding-power-over-ethernet-s...

It's undoubtably a cool solution, but in why do you need to remotely do a hard power cycle? Won't just SSHing in and rebooting be enough?

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#104
post #92
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it means I have no idea what TFA is talking about when it mentions USB versions, for one.

[flagged]

For me, it makes a difference much later on after buying some computer. I see a usb/c port and think I can plug anything into it that fits and it just works.

When it doesn't, it will take hours/days to figure out why and if it comes down to a cable incompatibility, I would have already made the mistake of not knowing what I was buying.

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#105
post #68
post #53

All these USB version names. I used to know what they all meant, but then the USB IF went ahead and renamed them all and made a bunch of versions have the same name and renamed some versions to have the same name as the old name of other versions. I have absolutely no idea what anyone means when they say USB 3.2 gen 2x2. I used to know what USB 3.2 meant but it's certainly not that.

To be fair they seem to have taken this often-stated criticism on board. USB 4's naming is more sensible, and they've pushed the simple data speed & power labelling that makes it easier to work out what you need.

Yeah, now it's USB4 Version 2.0 / USB 80Gbps / USB4 Gen4.

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of a POE Mac mini makes me happy. It would be a nice way of power cycling it from the switch, tidier than the smart plug I have. https://hackaday.com/2023/08/14/adding-power-over-ethernet-s...

It's undoubtably a cool solution, but in why do you need to remotely do a hard power cycle? Won't just SSHing in and rebooting be enough?

And when ssh is down because you OOMd or something else?

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#107
post #9

Is it also possible to power a laptop through those adapters? PoE++ can deliver up to 100W of power, more than enough for most laptops.

Yes, but look up the prices for PoE switches and you might reconsider.

PoE can be cheap, but usually never cheaper than non-poe. But if you have a PoE switch and spare ports, its very nice.

The problem comes when you try to design a large network and need random PoE ports on end devices where you can't home-run a cable back.

I have a Unifi Pro XG 48 PoE and I love it, but I still don't use PoE for everything. The cost of a (non unifi) poe device + the cost of using one of those ports always exceeds a simple power adapter on the other side (if possible).

I think about this a lot.

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#108

From the source of the RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver in FreeBSD: (old, not directly relevant, just amusing) https://elixir.bootlin.com/freebsd/v10.2/source/sys/pci/if_r... /* * RealTek 8129/8139 PCI NIC driver * * Supports several extremely cheap PCI 10/100 adapters based on * the RealTek chipset. Datasheets can be obtained from * www.realtek.com.tw. * * Written by Bill Paul * Electrical Engineering Department * C…

Those comments are about the 25 years old RTL8139, among the world's first highly affordable and fully-integrated Fast Ethernet controllers that ended up on pretty much every motherboard. Contrary to all of the aged complaints about the RTL8139, I ran several such on OpenBSD (and Windows) for close to ten years with no problems at all.

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#109
post #43
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hasn’t been my experience. I once tried to charge an M3 MBP via a lower powered wall plug. It was left off over night and the following morning the battery was still at 1%.

Note: Some devices expect USB-A on the charger side instead of C USB-A pump out 1A5V(5W) regardless of what's connected to it, then it negotiate higher power if available. USB C-C does not give any power if the receiving device is not able to negotiate it

My work has a little power strip with a usb-c and usb-a jack on it at every desk. I can charge my phone and iPad just fine with a USB-C cable into the USB-C port, but when I plugged my MacBook Air into it, it says “not charging.” Going into the system information tool I can see it’s only running at 10W. So apparently 10W is not enough to charge, but it’s still at least keeping the battery from draining.

A 20w charger will definitely charge the MacBook, just slowly.

Re: New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's undoubtably a cool solution, but in why do you need to remotely do a hard power cycle? Won't just SSHing in and rebooting be enough?

And when ssh is down because you OOMd or something else?

I don't really run heavy loads on my home server, so I haven't thought of that

Makes sense, thanks!

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