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Can anyone please explain me the diference (with the most detail as possible) between an Hub and a Switch.
 
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In a nutshell, a hub blindly repeats all incomming traffic to all other active ports. This can create a lot of unneccessary traffic if there are more than a few computer connected to the network.

On the otherhand, a swith maintains a MAC address table internally, giving the switch the knowledge of which machine is connected to which port. The switch looks at all incomming packets and transmitts it to the port of the destination machine. This is, obviously, more efficient than a hub, and much more scaleable too.

The next step up is a router, which can actually analyze the packets and decide whether or not to forward them based on certain rules (ie. allowing only certain ip address/port combinations).

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machow

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Dec 31, 2007
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So hubs, switches and routers basically do the same thing only that they have different capability on what they do?

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Yup, they all connect computers together on a LAN. It all depends on what it will be required to do, in what situation they will be installed, and how much you want to spend.

Most likely, the best solution on the market right now is one of those home gateway's (cable/dsl router). They can be aquired with a built in 10/100 switch, and provide NAT, DHCP, port forwarding, etc for connecting to a high-speed internet connection.

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One more thing.
A router will usually only have a few ports (eg. 2), and will be used for connecting multiple networks together. This could be a T1 connection to the internet, and an office's internal LAN. It could hold firewall rules that only allow incoming connections to certain ports, and to isolate the LAN from the prying eyes of the internet.

Often times there will be a propper hardware firewall setup behind the router that provies more rigorous protection to the LAN

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machow

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Alright thanks for the info. But my router is a p100 machine and it is very highly customizable when comapred to a regular router... and it's cheaper too! (got it from a friend for USD40).

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I can vouch for that.

I aquired some old pentium hardware as well as some scsi stuff, and put together a fly linux box for my home router. The thing is stable as a rock, and hosts ftp/http/ssh/etc... in addition to providing NAT for the LAN

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I've seen a scheme in anoter site how the switches and hubs work. And for what i saw there, i guess that a switch can improve the network performance when comunicating with the server, but most of the time it will only work at 10mbits between the workstations, so it will be slower most of the times. The add where i saw this was http://www.techweb.com/encyclopedia/affiliates/search?referer=http://www.commweb.com&term=LAN switch
In my work we are going to buy a switch or a hub, depending on what is faster in general. Any advices?