[GTALUG] USB to Ethernet Dongles WAS: Debian Linux as-a-router Guide

[Giles Orr]

On Fri, 8 Sept 2023 at 14:49, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
<talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> More to your point, it may be convenient for your router to have more than
> two ethernet ports.  Giles' box only has two, yours and mine have four.
> (Giles's box sure is cute.)
>
> Common wisdom has it that USB ethernet dongles are not always stable 24/7.---

This is a subject I know way too much about - which means you've
triggered a story that can be skipped by those not interested.  The
main point: I've never found a totally stable USB-to-Ethernet dongle -
and I've tried quite a few.

I'm fairly hardcore about having my computers connected to the network
via wires rather than WiFi.  I do use WiFi occasionally, to sit on the
balcony or the couch - but the wireless router is on a physical switch
which is off most of the time.  Which means I've become very familiar
with USB-to-Ethernet dongles and their quirky behaviour.  The most
stable I've ever dealt with are the Apple-branded ones attached to
Apple computers (they're pretty good attached to non-Apple computers
as well, although I rarely use them that way).  But Linux computers
with USB-to-Ethernet dongles are never totally stable.  I would say I
get a couple minutes of network drop-outs per day (across multiple
brands).  Which isn't a problem when I'm not in front of the computer
(they're clients, not servers), but when you're using Barrier to use
one computer's mouse and keyboard to control another computer, a
network outage knocks you off the second computer completely.

Sometimes these outages resolve themselves, occasionally (rarely) I
have to run `dhclient` by hand on the machine with the dongle.  I've
never dug into the logs to figure out why.

I have multiple USB3-to-Ethernet dongles:
- one "Amazon Basics" - fairly good, but probably the most drop-outs?
- two Anker "Unibody Aluminum" - slightly better
- three Orico 3-port USB hub + Ethernet - these are noticeably more
stable (still not perfect) and, because of the added USB ports, more
useful
- absolute worst: Belkin USB-C "docking bay" thingy: the Ethernet port
on this bounced every 30 seconds to 1 minute, totally unusable (and of
course being a "docking bay" it cost much more than the others).  I
ended up plugging one of the Ankers into a USB port on the docking
bay!

I've never seen this instability with built-in Ethernet ports: they
work or they don't, end of story.

-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com