Networking at LAN's

[AmigoThree]

Well I was browsing LANpart.com the other day and I was looking at the diagram of how they have the network set up and some stuff confused me.

http://www.lanparty.com/images/subpages/smallnet2.gif

That is the picture. I see they have all the stuff hooked up to hubs then all the hubs go to another hub which heads to a 4 port switch.

Now why wouldnt they have everything hooked up to a few big switches and why do they have hubs and switches mixed together? If switches are better than hubs why don't they just use all switches?

The last LAN I went to we only had about 10 people but everyone was hooked up to just 1 16 port switch.

[Yakbak]

If I were to set up a LAN, and I had the money, I'd go with all 100MBPS switches...they should work much better than hubs, especially with 4+ computers in the network.

[zmzhang]

Hubs are cheeper the switches. There are 10mb connections so it could be that when they designed this there were no switches with more then 4 ports.

[Daemonfly]

Yeah, my biggest guess would be COST.

Go price out enough 10/100 switches to wire the same network...

[john240sx]

also, in the picture, there's three seperate lans connected to the 4 port switch. there's three dedicated servers. could it be that they set it up like this so each lan doesn't have traffic from the other two? (like if everybody on one of the lans played on the same server)

i hope i explained that right.

[WildArmSX]

What they did there was segment there entire network which helps to limit and control traffic.

[PYROMANIAC]

Originally posted by WildArmSX
What they did there was segment there entire network which helps to limit and control traffic.

yea but they've also got like 30 computers on 3 hubs...it would make sense about using switches with the servers but using switches on the gaming pc's would make a lot more sense...when hubs recieve info they burst it to allthe ports..switches decide where the info goes...having all those hubs would clog the network (maybe)...if im correct dont layer 3 hubs act like switches in some ways?

[nebben]

It sounds like a contradiction: a hub is merely a repeater. When one device sends a packet through a hub, the hub will broadcast that same packet to each port. When data comes back (for instance, through an uplink port: which is usually just a special port which can be switched to use a straight through cable or a crossover cable), each packet is repeated to each node on the hub again. Fine for a small network without much traffic, but if you're going to have 36 workstations all trying to get their packets through other hubs, you're going to get tons of collisions...which is bad.

100mb will degrade, and you'll see much lower throughput. 100mb switched works much better since each node can get its data through to its destination without fear of such rampant collisions. Most data isn't repeated to each port unless it is a multicast or broadcast packet.

Anyway, as I said earlier, layer 3 hubs shouldn't exist by definition, since a hub is a repeater, and layer 3 refers to the third layer of the OSI model: the network layer. Since routers and switches have brains (unlike hubs), they can read each packet of data, and by reading the third layer, they can route the packet to the proper network.

In other words, hubs are cheap, and switches usually aren't. The graphic looks dated. If you can afford it, switches are better than hubs.

-ben