After many months of sh1tty service, requiring it to be restarted at least one a day, my wireless router has given up the ghost (on the plus side, you should have heard the satisfying noises when I took my hammer to it), so I need a new one.
I know it needs to have at least one ethernet/RJ45 socket, and so on, but that isn't what's vexing me. I also have a USB external hard drive, and was wondering if there wasn't some way of accessing it via my network. Indeed, I found it is possible to buy what are called, rather vaguely, "wireless device servers", but of course they are a bit out of the ordinary, and I couldn't bring myself to ask the bods in Mediamarkt whether they'd ever heard of them, because I thought the sound of the gears stripping in their heads might upset me. So I imagine I won't be able to get one of those.
But, I did some further reading and found that these days some wireless routers now also come with a USB port, into which you can plug your external hard drive, creating a cheapo NAS device. Now, how the heck do I work out which of the routers available from, say, digitec, does that apply to? Is the presence of a USB port itself enough to signify that I could plug my USB hard drive in and be able to reach it from all the computers on the network?
Oh. And what the heck is "DLNA", and do I want it?
I know it needs to have at least one ethernet/RJ45 socket, and so on, but that isn't what's vexing me. I also have a USB external hard drive, and was wondering if there wasn't some way of accessing it via my network. Indeed, I found it is possible to buy what are called, rather vaguely, "wireless device servers", but of course they are a bit out of the ordinary, and I couldn't bring myself to ask the bods in Mediamarkt whether they'd ever heard of them, because I thought the sound of the gears stripping in their heads might upset me. So I imagine I won't be able to get one of those.
But, I did some further reading and found that these days some wireless routers now also come with a USB port, into which you can plug your external hard drive, creating a cheapo NAS device. Now, how the heck do I work out which of the routers available from, say, digitec, does that apply to? Is the presence of a USB port itself enough to signify that I could plug my USB hard drive in and be able to reach it from all the computers on the network?
Oh. And what the heck is "DLNA", and do I want it?