Topology is a pretty tricky thing. Exactly where are your
cables going to go and how are they going to connect? As said
before, you want more ports on your hub than you do on
computers. In my home, I have 3 computers, (soon to be 4) with a
4 port hub. There is a slight problem though. All 3
computers are next to walls that are totally finished off, and filled
with insulation. What I ended up doing in my home, is drilling a
hole in the room upstairs with the 1 computer in it, and running the
cable though the rafters, to the utility room, which is on the floor
below, and on the other side of the house. From the utility
room, I ran the cable behind the molding between the wall and the
carpet, all the way to my hub, which is by the other 2 computers, one
being a Home Server, and another being the PC I am typing this
one. If I were to directly connect the computers "as the
crow flies" I would only need 15′ of cable. But, with the
setup I currently have, which is the easiest to do with this house, I needed
50′ of cable. Your
home may be different. You my choose to preinstall a RJ-45 wall
jacks in every bedroom, den, and living room in your home, which
eventually lead to a central hub, so all you have to do is plug the
computer in the wall jack, and plug the hub into the wall jack near it
that corresponds with the wall jack the computer is plugged into.
Running out of hub ports is
also a major problem. If you run out of hub ports, you have to
buy another hub, which will severely hurt your performance (I am
mentioning this again because it is very important!!) If you are
running a small office which will expand a lot, you will thank
yourself in the long run in buying a 32port Mega hub, instead of
changing four 8 port hubs together. If you end up having to
chain ports together, the computers on one hub will only have 1 line
to talk to each other, instead of having "free" communication
like they were all on 1 hub. So, if you have a proxy server on
one of your hubs sharing the internet connection, the PCs furthest
away from the server will get the least data if it’s on a busy
network. If you have to use multiple hubs, there are 2 ways to
do it. The wrong way, and the "if you have to…" way.
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