Re: Network issues... and new cable modem on top of that

It is possible via Windows's internet connection sharing to have a HUB get you on the internet, rather than a router, but its realy a lot more trouble and wont work as smoothly in my experiance.

The easiest way, is to simply purchace a router with enough ports for your computers, plug them and the cable modem in and go from there. But if you are set on keeping your current hub/switch, you can daisy chain it into the router, and keep your computers hooked up to the 8 port, and have the 8 port hooked up to the router. Either way, if you get a good quality router, it will not matter what OS you have running, as long as it supports DHCP.

Routers also have the benefit of making your network pretty much invisible to the outside world, only showing one IP address and it handles the NAT. It also would allow you to block/unblock ports and forward them to specific boxs if you wanted to run a external server.

I believe its also possible to run a computer as a router if you have 2 ethernet ports, but I've never done that so I cant realy comment.

Hope this helps.