Easy NW question: Share ADSL with 5+ PCs?

Factual Questions
1

Okay, I feel like a knob for asking something so trivial, but time and funds are short so I’d like to avoid any downtime.

I took over the management of a house through which exchange students flow like a river. The last guy who ran it advertised in the paper, but I find it more effective to advertise online. It’s more convenient (and much cheaper) for me.

A predictable side-effect of this is that as the rotation continues, more people coming in are wanting to connect to the internet through the ADSL connection. My router is currently maxed out at four, and I think it’s likely that I’ll end up adding two more in the coming months.

What’s the most sensible way to do this? My local dirt-cheap computer store doesn’t seem to carry any routers with more than four ports. I googled around for “six port router” and the prices I’m seeing are an order of magnitude higher. (Around $500 for a firewall/router versus the $50 I spent for my current one.)

Can I just get another four-port router and daisy-chain them? Or would that not work? If it would, it might make sense – there are three rooms upstairs and three down, so one cable running from the source to the upstairs might be a bit better than running three cables that far.

If not, I’m thinking of configuring an old P100 as a router/firewall and just buying a cheap switch. Is this practical? I seem to remember seeing an even more aged old computer being used as a router, but that network only had three computers on it. If I went that way, any tips?

Can I just attach a switch to the router, for that matter?

Sorry if this is a trivially stupid question, but I’ve never had more computers than my little router had room for, and I’m not sure what the logical, easy solution is, or if the way that I would inuitively try to set it up would work or if I’d end up banging my head against a wall.

Thanks!

2

If the limitation is just a physical one, sure. That would be the easiest way to solve your problem.

3

You would be better off getting a hub or switch, run one cable up ,and one down to separate devices , either the hub or switch and have your renters run their cables to the devices

You could do that ,but if you already have the router ,then your just duplicating what you already have.

See the above ansewer , you have the adsl going into the uplink of the router, which is the 5th of the ports , two separate cables going up and down , and number four is either free or your computer

We have about 9 devices constantly hooked up , accessing the net , its not that hard .

Declan

4

Most routers allow over 200 users to connect to the one router. The only set-up I can guess at is for you to have hubs branching off of the router

                       ==>Hub ====>5 computers  
                      /
                     /

ADSL ===> Hub ====> 5 computers


===>Hub ===> 5 computers

(I better get extra points for a diagram) Hubs are pretty cheap. It does require, though, that you run as many wires as you have Hubs.
One other way is for a wi-fi set up. You can have the 4 or 5 wired points taken up, and leave the onus of responsibility on the people coming in to have wireless network cards in their laptops or PC’s. Assigning multiple IP’s for that would be easy.

5

Try not to use a ‘hub’, grab a ‘switch’ instead. You can find a 8 port switch from the usual suspects (d-link, netgear, linksys) for ~$60. As said above, most typical routers can lease out 255 addresses for other computers, so you have the ‘brains’ of the network covered. Your new switch will have an ‘uplink’ port that you connect to the router (that will usually use up one port of your original 4), so you will have 3 ports left on the router, and 8 ports on the new switch.

hubs are kinda useless nowadays, as for the same price a switch will give better performance. (see: collision domain here)

the usual suspects:

linksys

d-link

netgear

6

Thanks for your suggestions, folks.

I think I’ll end up getting a switch for the upstairs and leaving the router downstairs. (Definitely a switch rather than a hub – five or six computers sharing one ADSL connection is already stretching it a bit thin.)

Yes and no – I was thinking that with this many people using the connection, a proper firewall might be practical. As it stands, I’m the primary bandwidth hog in the house (I sometimes suck down a few gigs a day, mostly from the binary newsgroups,) and everyone else seems to be more of the occasional web-browsing/e-mail fetching stripe of user. I know it’s selfish, but I’d like to keep it that way, more or less. In a nutshell, I’d like to block the ports for the usual bandwidth-sucking suspects – P2P proggies. My provider is pretty cool about usenet bandwidth, since it’s coming from their local servers to me, and they’re not paying for traffic across the NAP. Anyway, blah blah blah. At some point in the future, I’d like to be able to keep a closer eye and control on the traffic, to prevent finding myself in serious violation of my TOS and cut off from the blessed teat.

Anyway, for the time being I’m going to be lazy and just go the easy route, having faith that no one else in the house is sucking down crazy bandwidth.

Thanks da_pope. Those are exactly the reassuring words I wanted to hear.