[Gllug] Networking: Would this work?

[Ian Northeast]

Murray wrote:
> 
> I recently picked up one of these:
> http://www.redstore.com/techinfo/trenet001.php3
> And it will auto-detect on each of the five ports.

Looks like a perfectly normal 5 port dual speed switch to me. The price
is reasonable.

> So you can basically connect anything to it - another hub, a computer,
> whatever and it will do the rest.  Rather nifty I thought.  Especially as I
> assume you could use standard cat5 or a crossover cable for any of the
> connections without having to think/worry.

There is no mention of any such facility, which would be unusual to say
the least. Indeed, it specifically mentions an uplink port. You will
still have to use the right cables.

> But I *was* wondering what the limit to this would be.  It doesn't matter to
> me, as I only have a tiddly small network, but I assume at some point, you
> are going to notice your network speeds drop if you have too many hubs all
> daisychained together.  But I'm not sure quite where that limit would be?

There is no specific limit, it depends on what you want to do with the
network. But it would be unusual for a couple of linked hubs/switches to
get stressed in a home network. At work we are subnetting at /25 (up to
126 machines per set of switches). The above product boasts "address
table up to 1K MAC addresses" - connecting 1K machines into a switched
network would be pushing it somewhat in most circumstances. Switches are
better than hubs in this respect of course.

Regards, Ian


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