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Wired Networking Question
MosBen
Tacoma, WARegistered User regular
Tacoma, WARegistered User regular
Right now I'm running a wireless network, but I've got a guy coming this weekend to wire a few rooms of my house for a wired network. So, I've got a wireless router, but I'm guessing its four ports aren't going to cut it if I put in four ports in the TV room and a single port in a couple other rooms. So what do I need? A wired router or a switch? How can I run a wireless network along with the new wired network? Do I just plug the wireless router into the wired router?
Any help you guys can give would help.
Any help you guys can give would help.
MosBen on
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Switches are great if you don't have a lot of traffic on the nodes connected to it. Unless you're running a NAS or running a media center server on it, you'll probably be fine with a switch.
I'm in a two story townhouse with an attic but no basement. On the first floor I have a TV room with a 360, a PS3, the cable TV box, a Wii, and eventually a HTPC to run Boxee (I'll probably consider XBMC, but my initial short attempts have left me feeling like it's not user friendly enough). I'd like the 360, PS3, and HTPC to be connected to a wired internet connection for gaming and streaming media over the network to the TV.
Upstairs I have a master bedroom and an office that I'd like wired. The office has my desktop PC and the modem. The master bedroom doesn't have anything in it now, but eventually I'd like to get a smallish TV with maybe one of those WD TV things (or maybe a HTPC, I don't know). We also have a couple laptops and wireless devices, so I'd still like to have a wireless network in the house.
By my count I need five data ports (one in the bedroom, one in the office, and three in the TV room for the consoles and HTPC) for the LAN. Eventually I'd like to get a NAS, but I figure that'll be in the same area as the modem, so as far as I understand it's not really relevant to this discussion.
The questions are 1) Do I need a router or a switch, and what's the difference?, 2) How do I get the wireless network set up on top of the LAN?, 3) I understand that gigabit ethernet is the bee's knees. What do I need to get to set that up?, and 4) What's a "patch panel", and do I need one?
Anything else I need to do/know?
Basically, hubs, switches, and routers work on different levels of the network model.
Hubs (which these days you will probably never see in a consumer setting) are dumb as rocks, since they work on the lowest level - the physical layer. This means they are unable to make any decisions as to how to route data, so they do the only thing they can - they repeat what they hear on one port to all the other ports. This pretty much kills the bandwidth on a hub. So, if hubs are so crappy, why were they used? Well, up till consumer networking finally introduced economies of scale into the production of switch hardware, the cost of an x port hub and an x port switch used to be an order of magnitude apart. Of course, now that the price difference is gone, well...so are hubs.
Switches work on the next layer up, meaning that they can do some rudimentary packet switching (hence the name). They can read the MAC address of a device attached to them, so they can use that to determine if a specific packet needs to be sent to a certain device. Switches also come in two flavors - unmanaged, which have basic switching ability; and managed, which allow the users to refine and control to a greater degree.
Routers work on the third level, and as such can actually route packets between different networks (again, hence the name,) These guys can actually read IP addresses, and determine if the packet needs to go to a machine within the network, or be sent out of the network.
*EDIT* This is what I picked up about a month ago when I was looking to increase the size and speed of my wired network. Works great!
If one were to go out and purchase a more expensive router with more ports, say an 8 port router, that's essentially just going to be a switch and a router in one box instead of two anyways, right?
edit: The problem with getting an 8 port is that the cost grows quickly. If you only need a switch, it's going to be cheaper to pair a switch and router.
Basically I'm looking to do the same thing as OP, except that router now I've got this terrible network of switches all running all around my house and I want my network to run as fast as possible, seeing as I do have a NAS, and I have run into issues when trying to stream multiple HD sources at the same time.
Then go to each and record its speed, type (router, switch, alien brain, computer, game system), and location.
Most likely it's one of the devices connected to a switch or router and not the switch or router itself. That, or you accidentally set one to operate at 10mpbs. Then you've done two things: identified the problem, and created a network inventory.