On Sep 17, 7:57*pm, Tim S wrote:
coughed up some electrons that declared:





On Sep 17, 7:28*pm, "www.GymRatZ.co.uk"
wrote:
wrote:
The router is in one room, connected to the 4-gang. *The individual 1-
gangs are in various other rooms on various levels in the house. *The
way I look at it (as a layman in the network game) is that the wire
from the back of the router, via the patch cable, to the 4-gang and
thence to the 1-gang is just a big extension lead.

Could have been much simpler to simply run a single wire from the router
to a network switch which these days are cheap as chips for an 8 port.
Unless of course there was nowhere to plug a network switch in where you
have the connection box.

Um, what's a network switch?

Edward

It's effectively a router without the routing part.

Which sounds assanine, until you get some base definitions:

hub - boost/cleanup of electrical layer signal, does not understand any
protocol - no one really uses these anymore

router - is an IP endpoint for more than one network (ie it has 2 or more IP
addresses of its own). It can "route" or transfer packets between networks
using a rules table (aka "routing table") - the Internet is made of these..

switch - in between a hub and a router. Does no need an IP address (but may
have one so you can manage it). If part of a network, knows or learns how
to get different devices to talk to each other. Is actually a router at the
ethernet frame layer (uses MAC addresses as base addresses, not IP
addresses). Some switches have ability to make intelligent decisions about
where to send packets (or not) by looking into the protocol and seeing if
it's something they've been programmed to understand (eg HTTP, which is
based off TCP which is based off IP which is based of many things, one of
which is ethernet).

Fancy switches, like the big expensive ones made by Extreme and Cisco blur
the distinction between router and switch and general implement
functionality from both camps.

The long and the short of it is:

you generally have to set up a router, and you have a router as your
incoming end of your broadband connection - there's one the other end, and
maybe lots more between that and the news server you just read this message
off.

you generally don't need to set up a switch for it to be useful, but you
might if you're being fancy.

you don't set up hubs as a rule, but they're crap because for every packet
you bang into one, it sends the same packet out all its ports. A switch
learns the correct port to use, so is more efficient.

That may or may not be as clear as mud (blame the pear cider I just had).

Yo! Pear cider! My man Kevin Minchew (well, he's his own man,
actually) brews totally awesome pear cider. Single variety, total
headf*uck.

Anyway, thanks for the learned exegesis about switches, routers and
hubs. I take the point that I've probably over-engineered the damn
thing, but I've bought the router now so I'm stuck with it. But it
looks very much as if other equally clever bods up-thread have
identified the problem (incorrect wiring) so I'll let y'all know how
it goes.

Ain't Usenet wonderful!

Edward