what is slots in router or switch>?
963891
Not a great worded question.  Do you mean what are the empty slots on a router or switch used for?  If that is your question, you can put in various types of interface cards, like fiber cards, ISDN cards, ATM cards, etc.
877857
You need a router.... it will  allow you to use whatever pc you want.... also the router allows all pcs to access at the same time or individually.... you will not need to have a specific pc or number of pcs on at any given time... \ngood luck
1169373
the router takes care of the hard stuff, as long as both computers are set up to dhcp then just right click properties sharing enables files and folders, then just browse the network
171534
Think of it like this...  The "routers" you can go out and buy today at places like Best Buy, Comp USA, Circuit City, etc. are actually Routers with built-in Switches (with additional capabilities not really important to this question).  You can uplink your DLink Router to your LinkSys Router by going from one of the DLink's LAN ports to one of the LinkSys's LAN ports, and leaving the DLink's WAN port without anything hooked into it.  I'm not sure if you need to use an "uplink" port or not, as you had to do back when they actually made stand-alone Switches, but if that doesn't work, you might be able to use a cross-over cable between the two switch portions of the routers.
251845
You should be able to configure your router so that incoming traffic to each of three particular ports (or ranges of ports) is forwarded by the router to each internal system.\n\nIf you need web access to the internal systems, you'll need to include the port number in the web address:\n\nhttp://www.something.com:1234\n\nwhere www.something.com is set up to go to the external router, and the port 1234 is forwarded by the router to one of the internal systems.
205143
A hub is typically the least expensive, least intelligent, and least complicated of the three. Its job is very, very simple: anything that comes in one port is sent out to the others. That's it. Every computer connected to the hub "sees" everything that every other computer on the hub sees. The hub itself is blissfully ignorant of the data being transmitted. For years, simple hubs have been quick and easy ways to connect computers in small networks.\n\nA switch does essentially what a hub does, but more efficiently. By paying attention to the traffic that comes across it, it can "learn" where particular addresses are. For example, if it sees traffic from machine A coming in on port 2, it now knows that machine A is connected to that port, and that traffic to machine A needs to only be sent to that port and not any of the others. The net result of using a switch over a hub is that most of the network traffic only goes where it needs to, rather than to every port. On busy networks, this can make the network significantly faster.\n\nA router is the smartest, and most complicated of the bunch. Routers come in all shapes and sizes, from the small four-port broadband routers that are very popular right now, to the large industrial strength devices that drive the internet itself. A simple way to think of a router is as a computer that can be programmed to understand, possibly manipulate, and route the data its being asked to handle. For example, broadband routers include the ability to "hide" computers behind a type of firewall, which involves slightly modifying the packets of network traffic as they traverse the device. All routers include some kind of user interface for configuring how the router will treat traffic. The really large routers include the equivalent of a full-blown programming language to describe how they should operate, as well as the ability to communicate with other routers to describe or determine the best way to get network traffic from point A to point B.
244785
A proper switch is nothing more then a switching hub, or intelligent hub.  It acts as a logical bridge, but allows a physical and logical start topology.\n\nAs previously indicated a switching hub, can learn where devices are located and send packets accordingly.\n\nYes, you can connect switches and hubs together, although it would benefit you to use switching hubs, preferably from the same vendor.  Some intelligent hubs can communicate and manage resources better within a segment.\n\nFor your project, you may need a switching hub on each floor but not necessarily.  If the distance is not too great for the specific ethernet you select, a "collapsed" network (single star) configuration is much more cost effective.  With the collapsed design you will have to have more and longer "home runs" or cable runs to the ports from the switch, but each port will get full bandwidth.\n\nIf you place a switch on each floor the maximum speed you can achieve is whatever the shared bandwidth is available between the switches, between each floor.  So if you connect two floors with a switch on each floor, and the servers are on one floor and workstations on the other, using a 1Gbps connection between switches - your workstations all share the 1Gbps connection to the server, no matter they have 100Mbps to the switch on their floor - the workstation switch cannot talk faster then 10 X 100Mbps or 1Gbps to the other switch where the servers are.\n\nMost large switches that can manage hundreds of ports have 10, 20 or even 100Gbps communications on the backplane (within the switch itself), providing full 100Mbps communication from each workstation to each server.
906929
hub:\none broadcast domain\none collision domain\n\nswitch (no VLANs): \none broadcast domain\none collision domain for each port\n\nswitch (with VLANs):\none broadcast domain per VLAN\none collision domain for each port
1171501
A layer 3 switch will switch packets faster than a traditional router because the packet switching is done in hardware as opposed to being done in software.  \n\nThat said, if you have these servers all on the same network/subnet, you don't need either one.  Just a fast layer 2 switch.  \n\nBut if you are going to have to jump between networks/subnetworks where a router would normally be required, a layer 3 switch (a fast one) is the way to go.
280931
Alright then, the above is mostly right but, a hub takes a signal and retransmits it to all available stations. It is a dumb device basically a repeater. \n\nA bridge allows data to cross if it is destined for the machine on the other end ie (and this is an important distinction) if a packet is destined for the mac address on the other side of the bridge it is allowed to pass.\n\nA switch is a device that has a bridge to every port. So data flows into the switch and will only go out the port with the mac address that the packet is destined for.\n\nBefore I explain a router, I need to lay down some groundwork about networks.\n\nA Mac address is a hardcoded serial number built into every network device.  This is ultimately used for your address on a network.  Unfortunately it is 12 characters long and can be a mix of numbers and letters.  This makes it too hard to remember and is cumbersome to work with so an alternative addressing scheme called an IP address was created. You have seen them 192.168.1.122 etc.  The IP address is a shorthand for the more cumbersome MAC address.  \n\nWell as the networks grew larger even the numbering scheme became cumbersome. So DNS or domain name service was implemented. It converts an IP address to a name and vice versa. So www.yahoo.com points to 68.142.226.44 which intern points to the servers network card MAC address.  \n\nIf you remember networks started small and grew up over time.  One of the basic  rules of TCP/IP is that the devices on a network only listen for packets addressed to their own network.  A netmask tells the computer how to figure out if an IP address is part of the local network or not. If it is not bound for a local device it is sent to a gateway device that is connected out to other networks. \n\nA router is one device (the most common now a days) that acts as a gateway.I n a lot of respects it is a super inteligent switch. It howerver doen't operate in the same layer of the OSI model that a switch does.  I am going to leave this here because to explain more about a router would take a lot more space. If you are curious enough you could investigate the OSI model and take a look at the Wikipedia link below.
1009149
A network hub with both types of connection will do it. Probably cant get an actual hub, since most such devices are switches these days
54879
Hubs and switches are significantly different.  A hub is nothing more that a device that allows multiple devices to connect to a single network connection.  It also acts as a repeater.  In other words, it helps keep the packet signal strength strong enough to traverse one or more network segments.  When a packet enters a hub, the hub sends the packet out all ports.  So all devices connected to the hub see all the packets passing through the hub, whether addressed to them or not.  With large hubs with a large amount of traffic, this can cause performance problems.  A hub operates at the physical layer, or level 1 of the OSI model.\n\nA switch traditionally operates at layer 2 of the OSI model.  The primary difference between a switch and a hub is the way packets are handled.  A switch knows the MAC (hardware) address of each device connected to each port.  When a packet enters the switch, the switch sends the packet out the port where the target device is located.  Devices connected to other switch ports don't see the packet.  The exception to this is the layer 3 switch.  Layer 3 switch functionality adds routing capability to the switching function.\n\nA switch acts like a hub when a broadcast packet is received.  A broadcast packet is addressed to all devices on a subnet.  So all ports receive the packet.
347002
each device pulls a seperate IP address.  Once you modem picks up one many cannot automatically switch between devices.  You can get a cheap router($40) that will split that signal so you do not have to reset.  A router works like a cable splitter for your TV.....\n\nWireless will help as long as both your PC and Mac have a wirelss card.  About $60 a piece
163439
False - A router does not "split" the bandwidth - every port gets the full amount of whatever you have.
550408
u can use wireless access pint as a switch/hub only i.e. to connect more than one computers in a network.\nbut u can use wireless router as a wireless access point also and can do the routing means can connect two networks together. which is not possible by a wireless access point.
42555
First you need to know th differnce. To understand the difference between a router and a switch you need to understand the ISO model.\n\nISO/OSI Network Model\nThe standard model for networking protocols and distributed applications is the International Standard Organization's Open System Interconnect (ISO/OSI) model. It defines seven network layers. \n\nLayer 1 - Physical \nPhysical layer defines the cable or physical medium itself, e.g., thinnet, thicknet, unshielded twisted pairs (UTP). All media are functionally equivalent. The main difference is in convenience and cost of installation and maintenance. Converters from one media to another operate at this level. \n\nLayer 2 - Data Link \nData Link layer defines the format of data on the network. A network data frame, aka packet, includes checksum, source and destination address, and data. The largest packet that can be sent through a data link layer defines the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU). The data link layer handles the physical and logical connections to the packet's destination, using a network interface. A host connected to an Ethernet would have an Ethernet interface to handle connections to the outside world, and a loopback interface to send packets to itself. \n\nEthernet addresses a host using a unique, 48-bit address called its Ethernet address or Media Access Control (MAC) address. MAC addresses are usually represented as six colon-separated pairs of hex digits, e.g., 8:0:20:11:ac:85. This number is unique and is associated with a particular Ethernet device. Hosts with multiple network interfaces should use the same MAC address on each. The data link layer's protocol-specific header specifies the MAC address of the packet's source and destination. When a packet is sent to all hosts (broadcast), a special MAC address (ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff) is used. \n\nLayer 3 - Network \nNFS uses Internetwork Protocol (IP) as its network layer interface. IP is responsible for routing, directing datagrams from one network to another. The network layer may have to break large datagrams, larger than MTU, into smaller packets and host receiving the packet will have to reassemble the fragmented datagram. The Internetwork Protocol identifies each host with a 32-bit IP address. IP addresses are written as four dot-separated decimal numbers between 0 and 255, e.g., 129.79.16.40. The leading 1-3 bytes of the IP identify the network and the remaining bytes identifies the host on that network. The network portion of the IP is assigned by InterNIC Registration Services, under the contract to the National Science Foundation, and the host portion of the IP is assigned by the local network administrators, locally by noc@indiana.edu. For large sites, usually subnetted like ours, the first two bytes represents the network portion of the IP, and the third and fourth bytes identify the subnet and host respectively. \n\nEven though IP packets are addressed using IP addresses, hardware addresses must be used to actually transport data from one host to another. The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is used to map the IP address to it hardware address. \n\nLayer 4 - Transport \nTransport layer subdivides user-buffer into network-buffer sized datagrams and enforces desired transmission control. Two transport protocols, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP), sits at the transport layer. Reliability and speed are the primary difference between these two protocols. TCP establishes connections between two hosts on the network through 'sockets' which are determined by the IP address and port number. TCP keeps track of the packet delivery order and the packets that must be resent. Maintaining this information for each connection makes TCP a stateful protocol. UDP on the other hand provides a low overhead transmission service, but with less error checking. NFS is built on top of UDP because of its speed and statelessness. Statelessness simplifies the crash
327750
Well, that is a firewall, I would suggest connecting it both to your router and your switch.  Preferably in between them.....