Increasing interswitch bandwidth.

[Grrr!!]

In going ahead with this LAN, is there any way in which two switches can be joined while having high bandwidth. Gigabit switches are out of the question.

Is it possible to put like 5 cables between the two switches to increase bandwidth to 500Mbit?

[Deviant]

I only have limited knowledge in this, but yes you can..... ....but the switch has to be a managed switch (like a router) and you must configure it. These switches are more expensive than normal ones.

Is yous unmanaged, ie just plug and away you go? or a fully managed switch (normall 24 port etc).

[Wibber]

its usually called trunking, some unmanaged switches have it, but not many, shop arround

either that or get a switch with a gb uplink

[Grrr!!]

They are unmanaged. But how would it be setup anyway?, just in case I can get my hands on managed switches.

[Doogie]

It's equivalent to bridging two internet connections on your computer.

With a managed switch you set two or more ports as uplink. This isn't something I've seen in any switch less than a few thousand, even in proper routers. Most have dedicated uplinks, and while you can set bridging on certain routers/switches, most don't come to the level you want to obtain.

I've just had a look at a Cisco at work and yes it can do it. How it does it is setting up a number of ports as a VLAN type capibility and setting them as uplink ports. It then load balances uplink connections through 2 (3,4,5 however many) ports theoretically giving you double the bandwidth, although it'd only be 75% as much because of the overhead of packet stuff in tcp/ip over multiple connections.

This is why switches have gigabit and fibre interconnects. I mean honestly if you have a 24 port switch do you really want to lose a couple of ports to interconnecting???

[thabass]

I would stay from trunking on un managed switches,as they can cause all sorts of internal route issues,

Your better to start small and grow rather than make a mistake and give users a large crapy network, not to mention slow network.

[Grrr!!]

Thabass; I was thinking that anyway; and keeping leeching to a minimum during gaming.

[Tiggerz]

If you are running static IPs and just looking at a couple of people, then you can just put some entries in your routing table on your server.

Otherwise, I dont think you will get much performance (if any) increase from running multiple uplinks with out spending a lot of money on an intelligent router.

The network bottleneck if you have one will more than likely be in the server NIC. You'd be surprised at how many people bung in a client card, then wonder why they have no network performance.

[Eagle32]

Originally posted by Grrr!!
and keeping leeching to a minimum during gaming.

Never be fooled into thinking that will happen or that you will be able to make it happen. Plan for at least 1/2 the lan to be leeching at any point in time minimum, unless you've only got about 20 ppl attending.

(edit: just read your thread in "lan", you are only talking 20 odd ppl so ignore me :p)