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connecting two switches

L

l3ored

Senior member
I'm looking into buying a switch for lan parties. the biggest one within my pricerange is a 16 port. is it possible to connect two switches together if i buy another one later?
 
Originally posted by: l3ored
I'm looking into buying a switch for lan parties. the biggest one within my pricerange is a 16 port. is it possible to connect two switches together if i buy another one later?
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Yes, I do that all the time. If the switch has an upload port or is auto sensing, you can use a regular cable. If not, you need to use a crossover cable to connect them together.
 
You can do it, but you bandwidth on the other switch might get filled to quickly. Use this explanation. You could connect 15 people to the first switch (16 if your switch is like my linksys and has a dedicated uplink port). Those people get 100MBps each speeds. If you connect a switch to the 16th port You can have another 15 on the second switch. However all 15 of those people share that 100MBps connection. In other words they all have 6Mbps now. That still should be enough. Just dont connect another switch to that second one.
 
Not sure what your budget is, but if you can swing it, Dell has some nice switches that I've been using for LANs for quite some time without issue.

The Dell PowerConnect 2324 is the specific switch we've been using (currently have two of them) and the gigE ports definitely come in handy for tying into a gigabit backbone for the network. Right now they're going for $112 + shipping (holy crap, might be time for me to pick up another!) and are 24 ports of 10/100 and two additional 10/100/1000 ports.
 
Just buy whatever second switch is cheap.. most of the entry budget ones will even support auto-sensing, full duplex, cable select (xover or straight through). You'd be hard pressed to find a new switch with an 'uplink' port. (basically just plug a patch cord to each one and they're connected)

Also for a LAN party it won't make a difference how many in a row you string together even if you were forced to for whatever reason... unless you're getting hundreds of players. No games will fire out that much chatter that you'd have to start worrying about network architecture 🙂
 
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