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Networking (hub or router?)

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I live on a college campus and in my particular dorm I only have access to 1 internet connection. (T1) I am about to get a second system and I would like for both of them to be able to access the internet at the same time.

Many people have told me to by a hub (with uplink?) and some have told me to get a router. I know very little about networking.

The bandwidth division is not a major concern of mine. I will only be using 1 extensively on the net, and the other (at most) I would be using something that requires very little bandwidth (email, icq, gamehost) when it is in use.

I do plan on using either the hub or router to occassionally have private lan games. Is one better for this than the other? At most I only plan on having 4 to 8 computers connected at once.

Britanica

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Go with a hub. A router would be impractical. Just make sure you get one with the addecuate number of ports to your need.. there are from as little as 5 ports.. to 24 ports. I got a 5 port one a month ago.. around $40 from 3Com.

/---------------------------------------/
Be and let others be as well!
<b>The Dark-Knight</b>

Reply to Anonymous

A hub will do the trick UNLESS you have only one IP available to you. Do you know if you're only allowed one PC connected at a time or will they allow for a few of them? If you only have one IP available, I'd go with a nice little router. One of those Linksys 'cable/DSL' routers (~$170 USD for the 4 port version) would do it quite nicely and also provide you with some passive firewall protection. There are plenty of other brands of routers like that available...

Reply to Anonymous

if you are planning to have only two machines connected then you will need nor hub neither router. if you are planning to add more machines then you have two options. to use bnc or to use utp. if you are to use bnc this means that you'll have max of 10MB which is pretty good for gaming either.
if you use utp then if you are planning to have more systems added later it's better idea having a hub. for the time being you will not need hub as you can connect two network cards directly (only the utp cable must be crosslinked).
the other thing is the software. if you are using win98/95 use something like wingate. if you are using nt/unix/win2000 you don’t need any additional software. if you are using linux you can have nice routing either.

Reply to growchie

With some Proxy software you can share one single IP address for all the other computers, a router is hard to configure if you dont have experience on it.

/---------------------------------------/
Be and let others be as well!
<b>The Dark-Knight</b>

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