Question : Networking with Hub

1. is 10baseT hub fast enough to do lan gaming? for about 5 people...

2. how to configure the PCs and hub for a normal LAN network?

3. does a normal LAN network enough to do LAN gaming?

4. do i use normal UTP cat5 cable?

overall, i just wanna know the procedures from start on creating a LAN network from scratch.

thanks...

Answer : Networking with Hub

pennyroyal

1) A device boasting 10/100 capacity means that it will support either data rate on each interface. Generally they will negotiate between the port and network card to agree on which rate to use but sometimes this fails and you will have to set it manually before they will communicate.

2) A hub is a device in which the data on one port is sent out on all the other ports, a device plugged into port 1 will see any data going to or from a device on any other point. All devices connected are in the same broadcast domain so busy networks will suffer collisions.

A switch, on the other hand, is the new marketing name for what used to be called a bridge (they do have more capabilities than the old bridges but there are similarities). To all intents and purposes the connectivity is the same in that a device on one port can talk to a device on another port. The difference with a switch is that each port is a separate broadcast domain, if you have a pair of very busy talkers on a hub then their traffic will affect the collision rate for all devices, if you have the same situation on a switch this does not apply as each device is in it's own collision domain.

Also, consider the case where you have 2 pairs of devices on a hub / switch talking (ie A talks to B and C talks to D) and assume the hub is rated at 10Mbps. In a hub all devices share the 10Mbps bandwidth so A-B and C-D share the available 10 Mb (although the CSMA/CD protocol restricts the real bandwidth before excessive collisions to around 8 Mbps). In a switch each pair of talkers hase their own 10 Mbps channel so A-B gets 10 Mbps and C-D get 10 Mbps and there is much less chance of collisions so they get more effective bandwidth anyway.

Hubs are rapidly falling out of favour as the cost of switches drops - if you can afford it I would definitely recommed you go with the switch.


Re netware... Novell Netware uses a protocol known as IPX (Internet Packet eXchange) instead of IP. Many network games use this protocol and therefore if you want to run network gaming sessions you will need this protocol loaded.