Just my $0.02:
1) Don't by crossover-cables if you can avoid them.
You can buy regular twisted pair, and purchase
"cross-over adapters" and attach them to regular
twisted-pair cables. This will prevent confusion
(frustration, actually) when you confuse regular
cables w/ith cross-overs and nothing works.
You should be able to by a crossover adapter at
many computer-shows for $1 or less.
2) I lost the original post. Did you say you had 3
computers and 4 net cards? If that is the case,
you should have no trouble connecting the machines
without a hub, like so:
Machine A Machine B Machine C
NIC 1 +------- NIC 2 NIC 3 --------+ NIC 4
Where the NIC's are the Net cards,
'-----' is the twisted-pair cable, and
'+'s are the crossover adapters.
Note: Machine B will have to be set up as a
router/gateway, I think. I'm not really sure
of the details.
I will be setting up a small home network similar to this
in the very near future. The only reason I don't plan on
getting a hub is because of the 4th NIC that I have.
In other words: If I had three machines and only 3 NICs,
I would buy a hub rather than a 4th NIC, dispite the fact
that both would work, and dispite the fact that a cheap hub
costs $60, and you can get a cheap NE2000-clone NIC for
1/5 that price.
Bryan Scaringe
> On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, LENGARD Pascal OCISI wrote:
>
> > if you only have two computers to link you can:
> > 1/ use the coax cable solution (need 2 'T' and a terminator )
>
> two terminators, surely.
>
> > 2/ use a special twisted pair cable to plug directly into the two lan
> > adapters (in french this cable is a 'cable crois�'. Such a cable link the
>
> "cross-over cable" in english.
>
> > emit wire on one end to the receive wire on the other end (like a
> > null-modem cable for serial link). You can find such cables in computer
> > shops, that will prevent you from buying a hub but you won't link more
> > than 2 computers.
> >
>
