On Saturday 21 May 2005 10:40 am, Lee Wiggers wrote: > A router is faster than a hub, and a very cheap interface to the > internet connection at the same time. My SMC has 8 rj45, 1 WAN for > the modem, and a parallel printer port for a network printer as > well. >
A router is not faster than a hub. A router and a hub are two very different pieces of networking equipment. A router "routes" traffic between networks. A hub shares traffic on the same subnet. It needs a router to get to other networks. A switch acts like a hub, except that traffic is not shared between switch ports like it is with a hub. This is why traffic between machines on a switch can at times flow faster than traffic on a hub. For example... say machine 1 and machine 2 are sharing some large graphics files. On a hub, every port would have to contend with this traffic. With a switch, only the ports actually involved with the traffic would see it. On the switch, machine 3 could use the Internet without seeing any traffic contention from the large file transfer going on between the other two machines. On a hub, it would see the traffic and have to share bandwidth with it. As far as the machines connected to either a switch or a hub are concerned, every machine sees every other machine, they could care less. Get a switch. As far as a router , or what most folks incorrectly refer to a "router", this is usually a combination device for Internet sharing with a router (hence the WAN port to another network) and a multi-port switch (these are the ports that the computers connect to) built into the same case. These devices work well, are easy to configure, but nowhere in the same class as the stand alone firewall/router (IP Cop) I described to you earlier. Didn't you say you were on dial-up? If this is the case a so-called Internet sharing router would be useless to you , unless a separate switch was actually more costly that a router/switch combo, and you used only the switch part of the router. If you need to share the dial-up connection, the best and simplest way I know of in a multi-boot networked environment is the method I described earlier. Rick Kunath
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