Member Avatar for pcbuddha

Hi I am working at a university in the phillipines that has one internet cafe in the works, two computer labs for instruction and one library lab in the planning. We had several machines, cable, and HUBs doneated. Currenlty the different labs and cafe are in seperate rooms and networked seperatly, but eventually they want all the rooms networked togethre. There are approximately 32 computers per lab/cafe with 2-3 10BaseT Hubs in each room.

I am thinking there will be a problem when I connect all those rooms together using only HUBs. Am I wrong? I was thinking that I could have one PC in each room with two NICs (inward/outward). All Machines are running either W2Kpro or WXPpro. Should I be worried about to many hubs?:?:

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A practical, low-cost way to move from the current multi-room setup toward a stable campus network is to treat each room as an access segment and give it a proper access switch plus a single high-speed uplink to a central router/core switch. Replacing hubs reduces collisions and lets each port run full duplex, which is the biggest real-world gain you'll see when many machines talk at once. and were right to push switching and higher-speed uplinks; the paragraphs below show a simple, incremental plan and a few cautions so the upgrade is predictable and manageable.

Do this in small steps:

  • Count needed ports per room (clients + printers + servers + 1 uplink) and buy an access switch that covers that plus spare ports.
  • Use gigabit access ports and a gigabit (or SFP fiber) uplink from each room to a core/distribution switch. Use fiber only where runs exceed ~100 m or cross buildings.
  • Use VLANs so each lab/cafe is its own subnet; route between VLANs on a router or layer-3 switch and use NAT/firewall for the internet cafe.
    Example addressing (one lab per /24):
    192.168.10.0/24  Lab1  GW 192.168.10.1  DHCP 192.168.10.10-192.168.10.200
192.168.20.0/24  Lab2  GW 192.168.20.1
192.168.30.0/24  Cafe  GW 192.168.30.1

Avoid using a general-purpose PC with two NICs as the permanent gateway: it works for testing but is a single point of failure and usually lacks robust firewall/NAT performance. Phase hubs out room-by-room, label and document everything, and verify each stage with simple tests (ping, DNS checks, and iperf throughput tests). Enable port-security, STP on managed switches, and QoS if you need to limit cafe bandwidth for instructional traffic.

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Member Avatar for TheNSS

Well, if you want a fast network, you're going to need to buy switches and use those instead of hubs, but they're a little pricy. You can still use hubs, it doesn't matter how many hubs you have, you'll just have a slower network.

Member Avatar for blacklocist

Just as pcbuddha said you need switches. If you have 32 computers is each computer lab all those should be hooked up to a switch. Now if you really want fast make sure the switch has fiber. Run fiber back into a server room or central place. This way your network won't have a bottle neck.

Now if you want instead of using fiber you could simply use cat 5e or cat6 if you have a new switch that supports the speed. The main thing is how much of a budget do you have to play with? Wel have all cisco equipment where I work at and that was a big project in itself but now we can ping any computer in our network (and yes we have remote buildlings) as fast as we can ping our internal network card.

There is my two cents.

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