At 01:01 PM 3/26/00 +0900, Jeremy and Angela Newton wrote:
...
>I am assuming that I would better buy a switch to connect the three
>nets. If anyone can help me, please drop me a line.
Unless you're buying a clever switch to solve some problem with load
balancing, etc, the choice of switch vs. hub is one of performance and
cost. While switches are cheap enough today to make the cost equation easy
to solve, hubs still work, and you may not need to replace your existing hubs.
This is overly simplifed, but...
Hubs still move traffic between the various machines just fine, but share
the bandwidth and in Ethernet share the collisions. This makes hubs, in a
busy network, less desireable because they make all stations share the
total available bandwidth, which for a hub should be about 10MB for
10Base-T, about 100MB for 100Base-TX.
Switches, on the other hand, move traffic by connecting the sending station
more or less directly to the inteded recipient station. And they can
usually do this for multiple pairs of stations at a time. Therefore, they
accomplish two good things - 1, they allow more than one conversation on
the network at an instant. This makes your bandwidth go from 10MB or 100
MB to 10MB*n or 100MB*n,m with n the number of simultaneous connections
permitted by the switch. 2, they prevent collisions from affecting all
stations, that is if the connection goes directly from one station to
another, other stations are unaware of the traffic and cannot hear a
collision. And the two stations conversing won't usually cause a
collision, cause they are only talking to one another...
If you take the advice given by others and use a proxy server, you could
connect this to your telco router directly with a crossover cable. Then
the hubs or switches would be exclusively used for internal traffic, and
your external net would be secured by the proxy. Of course, if you want to
have some workstationbs directly connected to the telco router, you'll
probably be buying another hub or switch to connect several machines
together. In this case, if cost permits, buy a switch. Not enough
difference in cost to make buying a hub a very good investment.
At least, that's my opinion...
Rick
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