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[odin]

This is our current houselan:

CABLEMODEM
|
GATEWAY (linux box)
|
__ HUB__________
| | | |
PC1 PC2 AMIGA PC3

God, I really am a l33t ASCII artis ;-).
-edit- BAH, no non-proportional fonts here?

Ahem, I want to change it to this:

CABLEMODEM
|
GATEWAY (linux box)
|
__ HUB___
| | |
HUB PC2 PC1
/ | \
AMIGA PC3 PC4

Is this at all possible? In particular connecting the two HUBs together. I want to save myself pulling a *3rd* UTP cable to my room, you see :-).

[Quixote]

Odin opined:

Is this at all possible? In particular connecting the two HUBs together.

:-? I'm not sure about hubs, but I'm using an eight-port switch which is able to uplink to another switch, much like what you've described. It may work. How about borrowing a second hub from a friend and trying it out before splashing out any cash on one?...

[FluffyMcDeath]

Yup,

totally possible. But you probably want to use switches. As you start chaining more ethernet devices off here, switches will grease the wheels a bit. When you use hubs, all the packets are broadcast on all ports, regardless of the destination of the packet. With switches the packets are routed from the input port to the output port that connects to the destination. This helps lubricate PC to PC communication on the network while other machines go out through the gateway.

Probably on your network it won't be a significant matter, but switches cost about the same as hubs anyway. In fact, I think hubs are getting hard to come by. The last time I tried to buy a hub (I needed to sniff packets) the thing they sold me that was labeled a hub was actually a switch!!! Took me about 40mins to figure out why my sniffer wasn't seeing any traffic!!

[odin]

Thanks guys,

@Fluffy:

Well a HUB costs 30EUR at my local PC-whore, and a router 70EUR.

Still a significant difference =).

[bhyman1]

You'll be fine. Ethernet spec allows up to four hubs daisy chained together.

You'll either need an ethernet crossover cable, or make sure one the the hubs has an "uplink" port. This juts flips the send and recieve pairs on one end so the two similar devices can talk to erach other.