What's the difference between a hub, a switch, and a router?

a) you should be behind a firewall ... that will eliminate 90% of the threat, b) most chatting services do NOT share your IP address. You and your chatting partner communicate with, for example, MSN's servers, not each other.

There is one exception ... AIM I think has what's called "direct" connection which may expose your IP address. Use that only with people you trust. But that firewall above will also protect you in this case as well.

I'm not sure about audio, video and file transfers ... they may expose your IP addrss, but I actually don't know if they do, and which services might.

hi :)

my bf and I are a sharing an internet connection at the moment. Both of our machines and the modem are connected to a switch and he is running a proxy server on his machine. We can both surf just fine but have problems connecting to world of warcraft. he connects perfectly but i do not connect at all.
how can we fix this?
an interesting snippet of information is that when my machine connects to the internet, it uses his machine as a proxy and not the proxy server itself

I have a dsl line and connect to a 4 port router. I have 4 computers connected to the router and I want to connect 2 more. Not all of these computers will be on line at the same time so is it possible to connect a hub or a switch to one of my router ports and be able to use one of the computers connected to the hub or switch to go online while any of the other computers connected to the hub or switch are off or off line?

You should be able to connect a hub, as you describe. I do it myself, actually. In one case I believe I have a hub, connected to a hub, that finally connects to my broadband router.

hey one Q ppl

If i want to connect 4 PCs to the internet via router.. then do i need to make one PC a server( and keep it on continously).

One more thing, is it possible to connect 4 comp to the net using switch or hub, without keeping at least one comp as proxy server.

Nope. The computers would connect through the router, and wouldn't care about each other being on or not.

It's possible to connect them with a switch or a hub, but I really recommend a router for connecting to the internet.

I have a netgear fs516 switch that has an uplink port going to my netgear wgr614 broadband router. The router has autosensing uplink ports, but for some reason, I cannot get computers hooked up to the switch access to the internet. My wireless connections work great. I have uploaded the new firmware and have manually configured the IP addresses. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! dn

I got it! Straight through wire, port 8, uplink set to normal.

Finally, all my work in the attic has paid off! Thanks, dn

I have a router but is not working properly. It shuts down itself every other minute. I have a hub. Can i use it to distribute my internet over my computers instead?

The best I can say is ... maybe. It depends on how you are connected to the internet, and how your ISP would handle it. You'd also want to seriously beef up your internet security by enabling firewalls on every machine, since that's one of the big benefits of a router. It's might be both cheaper and easier to simply replace the router with another router.