Puyol is bloody good considering he's short and slow. Him and Pique are an excellent pairing. I'm a huge fan of attacking full backs from the old Cafu mold, so I'm a huge fan of Dani Alves, Ashley Cole and Maicon
I run probably the least secure system ever - no virus scanner and even the default windows firewall turned off. So there's not too much to interfere with it.
Never heard anything about this linklayer topology, but I have been using the network without any problems for about a year. It's only just gone tits up in the last week.