Router and Switch

paulselhi · 15 Sep 2009 at 14:16

I currently have a virgin supplied single portrouter which connects to PC1 which uses ICS to supply all the other machines in my house via an antiquated hub.

What i want to do is twofold

1. I want a router to connect to the internet which allows all my machines indepenant acess to the internet

2. I want to make use of the gigabyte connections between the pcs for file sharing/render farm

For 2 i thought of buying a gigabyte switch but for 1 i don't think this will work as each box will be competeting for the virgin supplied ip adresss

If i buy a 4 port router as well then how would i make use of the gigabyte home network as i don't think the virgin routers on sale here are setup for gigabyte speeds

Daegan · 15 Sep 2009 at 14:28

You either need a cable router with a built-in gigabit switch, or a cable router and a separate gigabit switch. Personally I'd do the latter, unless you're on 50mb VM cable a Linksys WRT54GL with Tomato firmware and an 8 port HP Procurve will handle routing and switching duties better than any half-decent gigabit router and for less money.

paulselhi · 15 Sep 2009 at 14:31

So the cable router links via one port to the switch which links to all the pc's. Will they now still get independant ip adresses from the router ?

Daegan · 15 Sep 2009 at 14:35

paulselhi said:
So the cable router links via one port to the switch which links to all the pc's. Will they now still get independant ip adresses from the router ?

Yes.

Banzai_Joe · 15 Sep 2009 at 14:43

I second the WRT54gs, it will serve your needs.
How many clients need connection and what speed VM do you have?
The Linkysys will hand out IP addresses via DHCP so there's no need for manual setup on each client pc.
To be honest, just about any gigabit switch will do you, your a home setup not a business, and you'll hardly notice any difference. I assume you have gigabit nics in all clients pcs?
Sharing your broadband across the network is no hassle either.
I have VM's 10mbit shared through a WRT54gs (non-tomato), across a 3com 24-port gigbit switch, with a cat54/6 wired network on a Windows Home Server setup.
I can copy files to and from any pc with a gigbit lan card at speeds between 30-70MBps, which i'm happy with.
The only thing you need to setup up is DHCP on your router, that's about it. Plug the VM modem into the router's wan port. Plug the router into the gigabit switch via one of its 4 lan ports.....job done.
Oh...and set up your wireless lan on the router if you're gonna be using that too.
Client pcs on the network will pick up an IP from the router as long as they are NOT manually assigned in Network Connections.

paulselhi · 19 Sep 2009 at 15:04

Thanks for the info, the main idea is to allow everyone to get internet (3-4 users) and be able to game online ( no ip adress hassles) and for me i want to,,well apart from surf for porn..i want to have all the pc's available for 3d distributed rendering work ( Max and Cinema 4D)

For the later the only really usefull boxes we have are an I7, two dual cores and a single core. ( there are three other machines but not really pwerfull enough and are kept as emergency boxes)

At the moment i run xp 64 pro but when rendering internally i am hampered by one machine having a 10 Mbps NIC the others have gigabyte NIC's and i think my old hub is 10mbps anyway

Thing is when rendering the most i can get is 10 cores at once, and i think i would have to up to windows server to get all cores to play