Hub and cable confusion

[Frankie Deschacht]

Today I bought a network hub, as I have my son connected
to my computer sharing my internet and some files, but we
wanted to connect my daughters computer. When we set it
up, after trial and error we got my daughters working, but
not my sons but then he tried to change the port, he put
it in the wrong whole, instead of port 5, he put it in the
uplink hole, used to connect another hub.

Could this be because my sons cable was not shipped with
the hub, and I heard you use different cables for
connecting hubs and just one computer straight into
another?

Any help would be appreciated
Thanks In Advance
Frankie Deschacht

 

[Ken Briscoe]

Today I bought a network hub, as I have my son connected
to my computer sharing my internet and some files, but we
wanted to connect my daughters computer. When we set it
up, after trial and error we got my daughters working, but
not my sons but then he tried to change the port, he put
it in the wrong whole, instead of port 5, he put it in the
uplink hole, used to connect another hub.

Could this be because my sons cable was not shipped with
the hub, and I heard you use different cables for
connecting hubs and just one computer straight into
another?

If I understand correctly....your computer and your son's computer were
connected together without a hub...ie, with a crossover cable? Now you want
to add a 3rd computer to the mix. For this, you were correct in that you
need a hub or router. However, you cannot use the same cable that you were
using to connect the two original computers. You can get around this by
doing as your son did, and instead of plugging the crossover cable into one
of the "regular" ports on the router, plug it into the uplink port. What the
uplink port does, is it "crosses-over" two pairs of wires in the ethernet
cabling. This is for communication between 2 hubs or 2 routers, etc.
"Normal" communication fails this way. However, since the crossover cable
does the exact same thing, the pairs of wires get crossed over twice, in
effect cancelling each other out. This should now act like a "regular" cable
plugged into a "regular" port on the hub.

KB

 

[Frankie Deschacht]

Thanks for that , Ken.
It all seems to work fine, however, there is one thing
that puzzles me:
from my machine (the so called "server", running Win XP
Home), when I click on "My network places", I see the
files on my son's PC (C:, My Docs and Shared Docs).
When I click on any of those I am denied access.
Then, when I go to "View workgroup computers" I see all 3
PCs, and then when I click on any of
those I have access to everything.
Is this normal?
Thanks,
Frankie.