Newbie in Networking - Can you help me!

Hi,

I am completely new in networking, so I have some questions which may
sound childish for you.
What are the exact differences between Hub/Switch/Router?
What is the exact fonction of a Server?
Can I connect my Cable Modem directly to the hub or do I
have to connect it to one main machine which is connected to the hub and
access it through this Computer?
How do I setup a Linux computer in a Windows network.

Thanks a lot for every answer!

 

A basic ethernet hub repeats whatever it receives on one port to all the
ports, so it's just a way of connecting several ethernet devices
together. Whenever one device transmits a packet it is relayed to all
the devices regardless of whether it's for them or not. A switch is a
hub that remembers which devices are connected to which ports, so it can
send the data only where it's needed, rather than repeating it on all
ports. An advantage of this is that there are fewer collisions (when
more than one device sends a packet at the same time, and they have to
back off and try again) because the packets are only going where they
need to, so a switched network will tend to perform better under high
load than an unswitched hub. It also allows duplex communication, where
each device can be sending and receiving data at the same time, because
the switch will be able to separate them, effectively doubling the
available bandwidth if traffic flow is symmetrical. But the switching
only occurs at the MAC (Medium Access Control) layer of the protocol, so
can only deal with a single network. A router understands IP (Internet
Protocol), so can tell if a packet should go to another network or stay
on the local one - it can also tell if a packet from another network
should be allowed to cross into the local network, and offers varying
degrees of configurability in setting rules to control this.

To provide a service to a client - it may refer to either hardware or
software. Take HTTP as an example: your browser (the client) connects
to a server and asks for a web page, the server sends the page to the
browser, and the browser displays the HTML in readable form.
On a LAN you may have one machine designated as a fileserver - that
means that you can connect to it in order to store or retrieve files
across the network.

A hub isn't smart enough to do this - you need something that
understands IP routing, so either a hardware router or routing software
like Windows ICS (Internet connection Sharing). You can get routers
that include ethernet switches, and that's probably the neatest
solution.

Set up for what? You can share Windows files using SAMBA, a cross-
platform Open Source package for dealing with Server Message Block
Protocol which is what Windows file and print sharing uses.