Hub or router?

[ejc]

Can somebody please explain how a hub differs from a router? What advantages/disadvantages? relative cost?
I have an eMac and an 8500 at present connected by a hub (D-Link).

[Bill]

This thread should give you some info ejc.

[Gary S]

I ended up getting a D-Link router for hooking up my 2 Macs.

Works great!    

If you want to connect to the internet with 2 computers, get a router. You can always connect the hub to the router if you need more ethernet ports, but the router is more sofisticated and minr was plug and play.

That's all I know.

[kelly]

Yeah. All that.  

Hubs are dumb, passive devices. They just connect things.

Routers are sophisticated devices.

"Routers use headers and forwarding tables to determine the best path for forwarding the packets, and they use protocols such as ICMP to communicate with each other and configure the best route between any two hosts."

http://www.pcwebopedia.com/TERM/r/router.html

http://www.pcwebopedia.com/TERM/h/hub.html

http://www.pcwebopedia.com/TERM/s/switch.html

[ejc]

Thanks for your help everybody. Now it's up to me to look at local prices.

ejc

[MamaMoose]

Imagine a street with a bunch of houses on it. The street is analogous to a single input line the brings in internet and mail data. The houses are individual elements, e.g. computers, laser printers, any ethernet device, etc. Incoming data has a header that says where this data should go, that is what is the address to which  the data should be delivered.The router dissects the incoming data and dtermines the address and then routes the data to the appropriate device.

For example, I have two computers, mine and my wife's, plus a laser printer all connected to a router. Each of us has a different e-mail address so that e-mails addressed to me are routed to my system. The laser printer also is routed to our computers so that when a "Print" command is issued, the print data is routed to the laser printer.

A hub, as Kelly pinted out above is a "dumb" device that just connects all the components together.000

MamaMoose