[PLUG] Advice on switches for home network

Anthony Schlemmer aschlemm at attbi.com
Sun Jun 9 20:22:20 UTC 2002


Here's a stupid question for you which I hope doesn't offend you...With 
some or all of the traffic not being broadcast to all ports are you 
sure that a hub was being used? The fundamental difference between a 
hub and switch is that a switch routes packets directly between systems 
and doesn't send packets to all ports unlike a hub. 

I'm not sure I've seen any of those little blue and black boxes from 
Linksys which weren't either a switch or a router. I've not used one of 
their DSL/Cable routers and so I don't know if they are a switch or a 
hub.

Tony

On Saturday 08 June 2002 23:59 pm, Steve Bonds wrote:
> For unmanaged switches/hubs the two big low-cost brands are Linksys
> and NetGear.  I've used both quite a bit and have been very happy
> with NetGear (formerly Bay Networks).
>
> I have seen a number of strange failures on the Linksys (hubs that
> weren't really hubs-- not all traffic was echoed to all ports,
> intermittent failures, poor 100BaseT-to-10BaseT buffering, etc.)  The
> NetGear has been much more consistent for some fairly heavy use.
>
> I have heard good things on the Linksys from people I trust, so my
> experiences might be somewhat unusual.
>
> A good place to get and share opinions on hardware like this is
> http://www.epinions.com.
>
>   -- Steve Bonds
>
> On Sat, 8 Jun 2002, Stuart Mathews smathews at pcez.com wrote:
> > I'm hoping to avoid unnecessary pitfalls of setting up a small
> > network.
> >
> > I have a DSL connection with a 2 Linux PCs, and will soon add a
> > Thinkpad and a printer. I'll need some kind of switch to link
> > everything up. Any ideas as to what they cost, what features I
> > need to keep an eye out for, as well as advices on who makes good
> > (bad!) switches? I'm guessing I'll probably see the best
> > selection at Fry's??
>
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug

-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at attbi.com
>>>>This machine was last rebooted:  12 days 12:44 hours ago<<





More information about the PLUG mailing list