College...ONE LAN PORT, 2 Puters

[StealthyV]

hello all!

I'm about to move into a single room at my college, and it only has one network plug in the wall. I have two puters. what sort of set-up is necessary to get both machines online? connection is through ethernet cat5 cables/pci card, and my mini-itx on-board lan.

I have till this saturday (nov 8) to pack my stuff, and it'd be great to have this problem solved before then. spending cap is $40USD.
thanks all!

~Branson

A switch would probably be your best route as long as each machine was setup w/ DHCP.

If they only give you one IP, you'd have to have one PC w/ two NIC's and use ICS built-in to Win98SE and up.

EDIT - I couldn't find any on CompGeeks, so my second choice would be MWave they have a Netgear 5-port 10/100 for like $32 +S/H

[Darthv15]

A normal run of the mill hub should fix you up just fine. I know of kids who have done this in dorm rooms and it worked good.

[The Terk]

Originally posted by Darthv15
A normal run of the mill hub should fix you up just fine. I know of kids who have done this in dorm rooms and it worked good.

true, a hub would work fine, just make sure you arent violating campus computing rules, cuz they do check bandwidth usage from time to time.... just an fyi

[StealthyV]

wow thanks for the speedy replies!
so the hub...plug a cat5 from the wall to the hub...then two cables to my puters? do I need any special cables, or just standard "wall-pc" cables?

further down the road (I'm getting my master's in one year, then I'll be getting an apt) I'll be wanting to set up a home network via cable-modem...would the hub or switch be what I need? I guess my question is, which solution is the most versatile?
tomorrow I will ask the techies about sharing the one line, bandwidth issues.
thanks all!
~Branson

I would just consider the switch better. It's faster, no collisions, and you could always use it w/ no problems.

[sm8000]

The hub will be fine for the dorm room, but for your home you'd want a router, for security and sharing the connection. You can buy a routernow and use it in your dorm room provided you disable DHCP in it so it doesn't screw up your campus LAN. It will then simply act as a switch (A switch is like a hub with more brains).

[joker_927]

most switches are about $1-$5 more than hubs, especially at the 2 port level.

Just buy a cheap switch. It will plese you ALOT more then a hub. Another idea would be a router. Since your only looking for a 2 port it should be really sheap to.

Do you know if your school is a DHCP server and issigns you ip's or what else it does? I router would be a sure-fre way that it will work.

Plus, if I'm not mistaked, a router would mask you from any school monitors, right? (So if they for some reason prohibit 2 computers using the internet in 1 room) the router only shows the school one IP, whilst you have two puters!

Correct me if i'm wrong on that last part.

Actually a router wouldn't be a bad idea. It's about twice what you wanna spend though.

As for the DHCP, the router is only going to going to provide DHCP on the dorm room side, he'd have to plug it in backwards to provide DHCP to the entire campus. The router can be setup to use DHCP itself to get the IP address from the campus DHCP server or a static IP if provided.

A broadband router would be a good choice, especially if you got WiFi. It could be used down the road easily as well.

You can pickup a Linksys for <$100 for WiFi and <$75 for wired.

[StealthyV]

the school assigns an IP addy per LAN port in each room.
I'm a networking n00b, keep those suggestions coming!
thanks
~Branson