mnathani_: mercutio : it really depends on the lens. Some really good lenses are cheap, not because they are bad, but because they are simple the make. I love my Nikon f/1.8 50mm. about $150 new excellent Bokeh is buying second hand dslr cameras a sensible idea? it seems a lot of people who get heavy into photography have at least two cameras+phone because nice dslr cameras aren't very convenient with their extra weight/size/etc. @weather -v yyz mnathani: Verbose results will be PM'd to you. mercutio: it's about as sensible as anything second hand, i suppose so in my home, i've got a Cisco SG300-20 switch that i wire virtually everything up to. i've got 4 25' runs going behind my TV, soon to be 6 runs. i'm debating whether it's worth putting a SG300-10 back behind the TV and then bringing two cables back to the 20 port in a LAG. link aggregation for home setups hardly ever makes sense but in your situation having two cables over four cables does sound nice. and considering you have cables and would need switch anyway, my main thinking point would be whether that requries a fanned switch or not. i think the sg300 switches are fanless though? yeah looks like they're fanless, i figure if it's not expensive you may as well. just don't expect to see much benefit from link aggregation i was curious how much latency difference there was from having an extra switch in the mix. and i got about 5us extra with gigabit, so even latency isn't likely to be a real concern. the switch is really just to reduce the number of runs so i don't think i'd benefit much one of the runs is my internet uplink, so my crazy thought was to stick it in an isolated VLAN ^with the router but that seems ... wasteful That's what she said!! but it might justify LAG? sticking internet in isolated vlan makes sense well it means it doesnt' get all the random broadcast traffic etc. i'm trying to find a cheap switch with lag :) so far my best bet seems to be hp ps1810-8g That's what she said!! most of the cheap semi-managed switches don't do LAG your internet connection could benefit from prioritisation at least. like say you have 100 megabit internet, and gigabit lan, and you transfer files over gigabit lan, you want your internet to stay going up to 100 megabit. whereas for the lan traffic you'd basically always want it to go to 900 megabit, and not be impacted. but from that pov you could just run two cables - one for the internet connection, and one for the switch with normal traffic. and in a home situation if you ever have a cable issue or such you can physically go and reroute stuff, to go via the switch.. personally i don't worry about traffic interfering sharing the same lan port with internet and lan btw. the only host that tends to send at fast lan speeds is the connection internet teminates on, which only has gigabit,and i just run fq_codel on that single port and am fine with it. because i have fileserver and internet on the same host.. and my optimisation that i'm consdering is having lan connections just come directly into a computer I do internet cable into one port in switch ( vlan x) and then all my internal boxes vlan xx and then a small nuc with centos + kvm and I use one virtual for firewalling between the two vlans. Very neat setup with a fanless 8 port gig Juniper switch. finding good cheap managed 8 port switches seems difficult i ordered that 8 port hp one, as i found it cheap here, and at least has lacp all the older 24 port etc cheap managed switches are all kind of power hungry and noisy and so not really suitable for home use. the whole green for idle ports came in on unmanaged switches a few years ago, which brought power requirement down quite a bit my juniper does everything the bigger models does.. :) very neat.. also has SFP ports.. got one where my internet fiber comes in and one in my officeroom so I have a trunk between :) I use them for CPE for my customerlinks just perfect small fanless unit. sounds expensive :) mercutio: how many ports do you need? JC_Denton: i'd like like 12. but i'm getting like 8 i can always use two switches Netgear M4100 has a good, fanless 12 port the Cisco SG300-10 is also nice but it only has 10 does it do link aggregation? sg300-10 is expensive and the netgear seems 10x as expensive as the hp 8 port i got :) actually that switch doesn't look too bad if getting non poe version if it just came down in cost a little.. they all do LAG check amazon both the Cisco and the Netgear frequently go on sale i need >12 ports and wanted fanless so I opted for the 20 port version of the Cisco but the reason i wanted a LAG is that so anything "behind the TV" couldn't saturate a single uplink problem is that lag doesn't really solve that amazon isn't often good for switches to here :( but there were some cheap netgear switches on ebay from china i meant the switch's uplink to the lan problem is that if you have minor background traffic it's easy for one port to congest one half of the lag could always designate one half of it for the wan uplink traffic yeah you could trunk the wan traffic on separate vlan but then you may want to do the same at the other end to err wan traffic on different port with just it's vlan and s/to/too/ and so you end up thinking that you may as well just run a parallel cable for wan that said i suspect those switches do prioritisation as well. or i could just run the additional 25' runs to my main switch http://www.ebay.com/itm/Netgear-ProSafe-M4100-D12G-Managed-Switch-12-x-1000Base-T-Layer-2-/131522144942?hash=item1e9f54aaae:g:ApMAAOSwpdpVZFPS this sems like good price m4100 is actually slightly layer 3 it seems. yep, both it and the SG300 are i think the m4100 has better VACLs too wouldn't be surprised if they're the same chip i really want to play with 802.1x trunk ports, but the SG300 lacks support :( ahh my cheap 24 port switch has 802.1x ECS2000-26T but does it allow the ports themselves to be supplicants e.g., the switch has creds to auth to another switch and become a trunking port ohhh probably not the high end ciscos do but ugh, fans it also has a terrible web interface