I've been working forever with a plain old hub and it's been working fine. On the other hand, everyone tells me I should never do that. I just received a nice 16 port switch from a friend, though-- but I haven't hooked it into the network yet.

I don't think you can even buy hubs any more, pretty much even the cheapest things you can get now are switches.

Googling 'hub vs switch' will describe the difference better than I could be bothered to, but for a small home network with only 3 or 4 PC's a hub is going to be fine. If you were going to set up any reasonably complex topology with multiple hubs/switches then you would definitely want to use switches.

Switch is better than a Hub. Switches provide each port with dedicated bandwidth to every other port on the swtich, whereas Hubs share the entire bus with each port. The end result is if you're transferring large files to another machine locally over the network, every other machine on a hub will be slowed down or anyone who uses the network will slow down the transfer, where on a Switch, no one else is affected. There's more to it than that but that's the basics.

Hubs vs Switches were a bigger issue 8+ years ago when they were still expensive, but now Switches have become so cheap that I don't think you can buy just a hub anymore, and the vast majority of Home Networking Routers come with at least a 4 port 10/100 switch built in.

If you're building a new home network, I recommend going for a Gigabit switch or a Router with a Gigabit switch built in, and at least Cat 5e cables. They're all backwards compatible with 10Base-T and 100Base-TX.

I still have a 5 Port 3com 10Base-T Hub, it was my first Hub and part of my first network. Now I use it on my Retro workdesk.

Another thing to consider is the protocol being used, if you are going to use IPX/SPX (netBUEI) then I would use a hub, especially if it's older DOS based machines using this protocol.

I have experience with an old POS system using Desk 2 Desk under MSDOS and Switches could be problematic with a SPAMMING type protocol like IPX/SPX.

Switches, even unmanaged ones will try to make more intelligent routing of packets and this is where it becomes a mess with this old prototcol.

Maybe under newer OS's it's fine over a switch but I found it to be a pain under DOS.

Thanks for all the input guys

This is all looking harder than I originally thought. What I wanted to do was put a second internet card in a linux box, and the it for samba or possibly internet-sharing.

It recognizes the second card, but is not showing it as active, even if I switch the internet connection to it.

I am realizing I am going to have to assign an IP to the second card, even if it just being used for samba, correct? (Actually, I tried that at in was still shown as inactive. What exactly makes a card active? Does it have to be connected)?

And then I am going to have to samba which card to use, correct?

I just recently bought two Gigabit 8-port switches for my new place and they only cost 40 bucks each.

Mein difference is that hubs are "dumb". What comes in one port, gets blasted out all the other ports.

A switch uses MAC addresses to figure out where what goes.

With a hub the network can quickly be "congested", whereas with a switch this is heaps better.

Why do you need 2 network cards in your linux box? I'd only bother with that if you are using it as a firewall, and have a public IP for one of the cards. If you are using ADSL chances are you already have a NAT firewall in your modem/router.

Well this may sound simplistic, but the ethernet card only has one connection and goes to the cable modem, so how are you going to connect it to another PC without a second card?

The last time I tried something like this, it wasn't connected to the internet, so assign a couple of IP addresses and it was up and running....

What is it you actually want to do?

For a home network and shared internet access, all you need is an ADSL modem/router. That modem/router usually comes with a 4-port switch. Any more, just buy an 8, 16 or 24 port switch and you are set.

It really depends on the type of cable modem you have.
If you have a modem/router you can just plug your modem into a switch, and connect all the PC's to the same switch. Single NIC in each.

If its just a plain modem you can probably get a a router with a WAN port on it and connect the modem to that (most of these usually have at least 4 LAN ports for you to connect your PC's to, again all you need is a single NIC in each).

I wouldn't even worry about hubs, I'd be very surprised if you could even buy one any more. Everything is a switch these days.

Sounds like what you're trying to do is set up a basic network to share an internet connection from a Cable Modem to multiple PCs. The Modern day Home Router will do the trick just fine. They act as a standalone computer who's only purpose is to share the Internet with multiple machines, and most modern ones have a 4 port switch bulit in, no need for 2 NICs and Routing on the Linux box. Most are ready to do that out of the box, though if you get a wireless one, be sure to password protect the wireless or turn it off. Just plug the existing modem into the Router, then Router to the PCs.

I tried this once as my switch only had 4 ports, my router had only 1, so I used extra nics in a linux box to add more connections.

It did eventually work but it really put me off linux and indeed the linux ethos which had attracted me in the first place - it can be hard to get this kind of thing working and there sometimes seem to be random luck elements involved; there's a lot of inconsistent advice out there, poor documentation and changing syntax and hardware support between releases, and if you don't quite know what you're doing it can be very hard to ask the right questions so that someone who does know what they're doing can help you.

As I recall I then found that windows 2000 could do the job with just a few commands, but you're still left with the hassle of putting machine X on so that machine Y can get to something on the network.

I bought an 8-port switch, it's so much easier.

ratfink wrote:

I tried this once as my switch only had 4 ports, my router had only 1, so I used extra nics in a linux box to add more connecti […]
Show full quote

I tried this once as my switch only had 4 ports, my router had only 1, so I used extra nics in a linux box to add more connections.

It did eventually work but it really put me off linux and indeed the linux ethos which had attracted me in the first place - it can be hard to get this kind of thing working and there sometimes seem to be random luck elements involved; there's a lot of inconsistent advice out there, poor documentation and changing syntax and hardware support between releases, and if you don't quite know what you're doing it can be very hard to ask the right questions so that someone who does know what they're doing can help you.

As I recall I then found that windows 2000 could do the job with just a few commands, but you're still left with the hassle of putting machine X on so that machine Y can get to something on the network.

I bought an 8-port switch, it's so much easier.

If you don't know your way around unix and are not sure how a gateway, router or firewall works then I really wouldn't reccomend trying it yourself.

On the other hand, if you know what you're doing, then doing this on unix/linux can be accomplished with 2 commands... and they're the same on virtually any version of unix: 'ifconfig' and 'route'. Networking on unix 'just works'.

Thanks for all the input guys

I have been doing some reading on all this - what I was really talking about setting up was a linux router/gateway to connect a network to the internet
)

megatron-uk wrote:

If you don't know your way around unix and are not sure how a gateway, router or firewall works then I really wouldn't reccomend trying it yourself.

Networking on unix 'just works'.

Yes, I was finding problems with iptables/ipchains not working as advertised [I noticed it was completely revamped after I moved on to something else, so can't help feeling I wasn't the only one who found it to be a pita] but I'm sure you're right: with an appropriate level of familiarity and a match between your state of knowledge and what you're trying to achieve, it will "just work".

The main difference in a hub and a switch is how they handle packets. When a packet comes in to any port on a hub it is transmitted to all other ports, requiring every device connected to see if the packet was destined for them. Even if it wasn't they have to use a CPU cycle to check. A switch maintains a table of MAC addresses and associated ports so it only sends a packet to the port for the destination MAC. Broadcasts are the only thing sent to all ports.

The other major difference is that hubs only act in half duplex mode, so on a busy network you can have a lot of Ethernet collisions when two packets are transmitted at once from different devices, requiring both to retransmit again which can cause slowness on the network.