DeanB <deanbrown3d@yahoo.com> hath wroth:

>Although I'm a software developer, I am not so familiar with
>networking technologies, and I would like a sanity check on this
>before I purchase anything:

Wireless has been known to cause insanity. Or, perhaps one needs to
be insane to get involved in wireless. My brain is too far gone to
decide which is true.

>In my living room now, I have cable internet coming into a Motorola
>Surfboard cable modem, and out of that into a Linksys WRT54G wireless/
>4 port router. All is fine. I want to keep the wireless on this level
>of the house.
>
>However, in the basement, the last owner installed a small hub with
>ethernet going into 8 rooms (nice!). I want to purchase a new switch
>(8 or 16 port), install it in the basement with all the ethernet lines
>branching out from there.

Check your cabling. Does it say CAT5 or CAT5e on the cable jacket? If
not, you may have a performance or data corruption problem. The small
hub might be 10baseT (10 Mbit/sec) only, which means that the previous
owner may have been cheap and used CAT3 cable. That's fine for
10Mbits/sec but will not work at 100BaseT or gigabit.

>Question 1: What would be an appropriate switch here? I like Linksys,
>and the basement setup is a rack mount system. Not sure which model to
>buy.

I hate to admit to random behavior (a sure sign of insanity), but I
tend to use whatever switch I can find. Sometimes, it's the cheap
piece of junk that the big box store has on sale. Other times, it's
some surplus rack mounted managed (SNMP) devices that I picked up
cheap on eBay. I don't recall ever making an attempt to optimize my
switch purchase by any feature other than price.

The major features that should be considered are:
1. Number of ports (there's never enough)
2. Speed. Do you need or want gigabit? I would because it seems
that almost everything these daze is going gigabit ethernet.
3. Management. Do you plan to monitor or control traffic with SNMP?
If so, you need a "managed" switch. I don't think you need this.
4. VLAN. Are you planning to seperate broadcast domains? With a
system as small as yours, probably not.

Rack mounting is nice, but not really necessary for a small switch. I
have 4 racks in my house, which function as storage than as an
equipment mounting. For small odd size boxes, I have several shelves
full of junk. Works well.

I guess I do have a favored ethernet rack mounted switch. Netgear
FS524 (24 port 100/10base-T). About $45 including shipping used on
eBay. Make sure you get the weird looking rack ears. The bad news is
that it has a small fan inside, which might be a problem if you don't
like noise. It also doesn't do gigabit ethernet or SNMP management.
However, it is cheap.

>Question 2: Can I simply run an ethernet cable up from on of the ports
>on this new switch to my WRT54G upstairs?

Yep. You can daisy chain ethernet switches until you hit some timing
limit (at about 1500 ft end to end). Each segment must also be less
than 300ft. You can't do that with ethernet hubs. Also, there are
many types of "ethernet cable". Methinks CAT5e is what you want.

Drivel: I was bored one day and needed some entertainment. So, I dug
out a mess of ethernet crossover cables, and ran them between adjacent
ethernet ports on a pile of 3ea 24 port ethernet switches. I think
there were about 30 patch cables involved. It worked just fine and I
had no problem browsing the network through that mess. I guess that
means you can daisy chain at least 32 ethernet switches.


--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558