Extending home LAN with switches

FrankGrimes

My router has 4 wired ethernet ports and is placed in an 'office' room in my house connected directly to my NTL cable modem. I have cat5e run to various points around the house from the office.

I now need to add more devices in the office, which will bring total number of connections to the network to about 7 so I need more ports.

Can I just buy a 5-port switch and connect the new devices to it and then connect the switch to the router or is it not as simple as that?

Also, in one bedroom I have only one Cat5e cable running back to the office but I have 2 devices I need to connect to the network in that room. If I hook a switch up in that room (in addition to the switch in the office) to both devices and hook it up to the cable running back to the office, will this configuration work or will there by IP naming conflicts or similar issues?

Dabs.ie seem to have a good range of switches and I'll be placing an order for a printer with them anyway - is there any particular one I should go for and is there any difference in terms of speed and reliability between the €12 one and the €20 ones?

The network is mainly used for streaming video & music from a htpc to a server, xbox 360, and audio to a network music player, along with some VOIP and its a 100Mbps network. Thanks.

FrankGrimes

D'oh - wrong forum - can a Mod please move to Nets & Comms? Thanks

irlrobins

Sure. Use the report post function in future if you want a thread move. Gets a quicker response.

PogMoThoin

Can I just buy a 5-port switch and connect the new devices to it and then connect the switch to the router or is it not as simple as that?

Yes, just make sure all devices are set to automatically get ip address & that router is set to handle dhcp.

Also, in one bedroom I have only one Cat5e cable running back to the office but I have 2 devices I need to connect to the network in that room. If I hook a switch up in that room (in addition to the switch in the office) to both devices and hook it up to the cable running back to the office, will this configuration work or will there by IP naming conflicts or similar issues?

Use a 2nd switch in the bedroom, but make sure cat5 is not connected to another switch ie, comes from a port on router in office not switch.

Any 100Mbps switch will do, I'd just get the cheapest as you'll need 2.

Good luck,

Pog

FrankGrimes

Thanks - I think I get ya: a device connected to a switch connected to another switch which is then connected to the router causes issues, but no issues if all switches are directly connected to the router?

That's a couple of cheap and cheerful switches coming my way so!

blorg

FrankGrimes wrote: »

Thanks - I think I get ya: a device connected to a switch connected to another switch which is then connected to the router causes issues, but no issues if all switches are directly connected to the router?

No, you can daisy-chain switches off each other and it will work fine; they do not all have to be connected directly to the router.

Most switches (and all cheap ones) are relatively "dumb" physical link (layer 2) devices that don't know anything about IP addresses, etc (network layer - layer 3.) You just plug them in and they work, there is no configuration required.

From a DHCP point of view a device connected through one or more switches to the router will behave just the same as one directly connected.

You will not get any IP conflicts from these switches. You could get conflicts if you stuck in another _router_ however which operate on the network layer (layer 3.) In such a case configuration would be needed.

Snowbat

The only issue I can think of is that two daisychained switches would be sharing the bandwidth of a single uplink to the router but you'd have to saturate the uplink with, say, a wire-speed file transfer *and* significant traffic to/from another machine to notice that.

Have you considered gigabit switches? They're a little more expensive than 10/100 switches but backwards compatible and will give you very fast data transfer between computers with onboard gigabit ports.

FrankGrimes

Thanks for the great info lads. Reckon I'll go with a couple of cheapo switches and see how I get on.

I'll have a look at the price of the gigabit switches and make a call on it then.

PogMoThoin

Snowbat wrote: »

The only issue I can think of is that two daisychained switches would be sharing the bandwidth of a single uplink to the router but you'd have to saturate the uplink with, say, a wire-speed file transfer *and* significant traffic to/from another machine to notice that.

Exactly why i advised on seperate link 2 router without going through switch in office.