On Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 11:45:57AM -0600, Gary L. Hennigan wrote: > I gather I need a HUB or a switch for anything more than two hosts?
If you're using cat5. If you're just using coax cable, you don't need a hub or switch and can just hang everything off the one wire. > Which one? I believe I understand the difference. A hub acts as a > simple amplifier. Any signal it receives on one of it's ports is > amplified and sent to all it's other ports. A switch, if my > understanding is correct, adds some smarts to the process and only > sends the signals to relevant ports. So if machine A sends a packet to > machine B that packet is only sent to the port that machine B is That's about it. Hubs can have some smarts in them - they can cut off hosts that are flooding the network and detect faulty cabling. > connected to. Is there any advantage to a switch in a small home > network? Money, at this level, really isn't the issue, but I don't > want to spend extra money on a switch if it's overkill for a small > network and doesn't really buy me anything. Unless you find that your bandwidth is constantly saturated, I wouldn't worry about a switch. -- Mark Brown mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Trying to avoid grumpiness) http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/ EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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