For our Pre-Super Bowl Party, my friends and I are planning a large Halo 2 Lan party.
We’re hoping to have 10-12 people there, and don’t want any more than 2 people per TV, thus we will need to link at least 6 X-Boxes together. I’ve only ever done 4, using my Linksys wired router. I’m wondering two separate things.
Is it possible to link them together using 2 different brands of 4 port routers?
i.e. - My linksys has 3 boxes into it, and one port going to another router, with 3 boxes out of that one?
If I need to buy a 6 (might as well go 8!) port something, would a switch work just the same as a router, and would something like this Linksys Switch work?
I’m really looking forward to the chance to kill 6 of my closest friends while we all sit back and drink some alchoholic beverages (the better to help our eye-hand coordination don’t you know!)
I was just told that Fry’s has an Airlink 8 port switch on sale for $10. Any idea if that would work?
I browsed around online a bit looking for the answer, but when you put in anything about linking x-boxes, all you get is ads for routers, or stories about people having parties.
Tritan, do you mean the trick with the routers, or just using a switch. I’d rather just do that if I knew someone else had been able to use one. I’m just not very versed on the difference between switch/router/hub.
Maybe I’ll just take the risk and run over to Fry’s for lunch and pick up the switch.
You need a switch or hub and enough Ethernet cables to connect each Xbox to the hub or switch.
On the differences between hubs, switches, and routers:
A hub mirrors the traffic from one port onto all the others. The theoretical effective bandwidth is the line speed (ex. 100 Mbps) divided by the number of hub ports. With an 8 port hub, the theoretical bandwidth is 12.5 Mbps, for example. Also, hubs will automatically drop the connection speed to the lowest speed computer connected to it. If you have three 100 Mbps computers and 1 10 Mbps computer connected to the hub, the entire hub will operate at 10 Mbps.
A switch is more intelligent and examines each data frame to determine which computers are attached to each port, and only sends the frames to the appropriate port. With a switch, each computer has the full line speed available to it. They are more efficient when compared to hubs and provide a certain degree of privacy because traffic is not being sent across the entire network, but switches are more expensive when compared to hubs.
A router divides two logical networks and controls the data flow between them. On a home network, for example, the router manages traffic flow to and from the Internet. The router won’t pass traffic intended for another host on the home LAN, but will direct (route) traffic from a computer to the Internet when that computer accesses an Internet resource. This holds true for all routers, whether they are controlling an Internet connection or the connection between two buildings in a corporate facility. It may help somewhat if you realize that a router really only has two ports, the WAN (outside) port and the LAN (local) port. So-called multi-port routers really have a switch or hub connected to the LAN side of the router.
A switch is what you want. If you attach a 4-port switch to your router, you’ll end up with 6 ports you can plug xboxes into (one port on each used for the uplink cable), and they’ll all use your router as their DHCP server.
A hub does the same thing, but is not quite as efficient with the bandwidth, so if you’re going to have 6 xboxes whaling on the network, you might as well go with a switch.
A second router will not work, unless you disable its DHCP server functionality and make sure you plug its LAN side (not WAN side) into the first router. This probably isn’t worth the headache unless you know what you’re doing.
Thanks everyone, especially for clearing up the difference between the three. It helps to have some idea what I’m talking about.
I’m not worried about going over the 16 player limit, we just don’t want more than two people per TV. It’s just not as fun to split things like that.
I went ahead and picked up that switch yesteday, so I’m glad to hear that’s really what I want. I figured for $10 bucks, even if I’m wrong it’s something I don’t mind having around the house… you know, for those times your just HAVE to get that 8 station network up and running! (right - I had a hell of a time just getting ME and XP to talk to each other.)