switch or hub?

My friend called me on the phone and said .he has a simple Ethernet
cable coming into his desk at work. He hooks that cable to his docking
station and plugs his laptop into the docking station and away he goes
on the internet. What he wants is to bring his pc into the office and
hook it up at the same time. I told him he needs a hub but on
retrospect would it be better to get a switch or a hub in his
situation? I have no idea how many others in his building use this
cabling but he will only be using these two computers. Any
recommendations? Thanks
yks

On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 22:02:14 -0700 (PDT), yksmir <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>My friend called me on the phone and said .he has a simple Ethernet
>cable coming into his desk at work. He hooks that cable to his docking
>station and plugs his laptop into the docking station and away he goes
>on the internet. What he wants is to bring his pc into the office and
>hook it up at the same time. I told him he needs a hub but on
>retrospect would it be better to get a switch or a hub in his
>situation? I have no idea how many others in his building use this
>cabling but he will only be using these two computers. Any
>recommendations? Thanks
>yks

A switch reduces potential problems to the minimum.
Any cheap soho switch will do just fine...

/daytripper

yksmir <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:

> I told him he needs a hub but on retrospect would it be better to get
> a switch or a hub in his situation? I have no idea how many others in
> his building use this cabling but he will only be using these two
> computers. Any recommendations?

I haven't seen regular hubs for ages. I have an old one in the cellar
you can have if you want. (-: Unmanaged switches are trivially cheap
these days. Things like the TRENDnet TE100-S8 work well enough for most
purposes. (They have a five-port version too, I think.) I don't think
I've had much of a problem with 3Com stuff either. I just go for ones
that autosense everything.

So, he should just go ahead and get a cheap switch where he can just
plug in and go.

Mark

yksmir wrote:
> My friend called me on the phone and said .he has a simple Ethernet
> cable coming into his desk at work. He hooks that cable to his docking
> station and plugs his laptop into the docking station and away he goes
> on the internet. What he wants is to bring his pc into the office and
> hook it up at the same time. I told him he needs a hub but on
> retrospect would it be better to get a switch or a hub in his
> situation? I have no idea how many others in his building use this
> cabling but he will only be using these two computers. Any
> recommendations? Thanks


Almost everything is a switch these days, no real advantage (i.e. cost)
to having simple hubs anymore. A switch was also known as a bridge in
the olden days.

A cheap way to buy a switch is to simply buy a broadband router, and not
use its WAN port. The typical 4-port LAN ethernet ports are really just
a switch.

Yousuf Khan