Connecting Hubs

i dont think there would be much of a limit, if you wanted to link a bunch of stuff together you would be better off with switches. if you already have the hubs, then link them together untill you get data loss or you cant connect from one end to the other.

There is an ethernet limit of 4 hubs daisy chained. Switches reset the number, and I don't know of a practical limit on those.

There is not a limit physically because the 5-4-3 rule doesn't really apply with hub-and-spoke style ethernet, just for bus ethernet (10base2, 10base5). Provided the cable distance between signal regeneration devices (hubs) is within the prescribedlimits (100m for 10/100Mb ethernet) then you will be all right.

The problem comes when you get into having too large a collision domain. All hubs on a segment, whether stacked or daisy-chained, are part of the same collision domain. As devices are added to the segment the collision rates and broadcast rates increase to the point where the network is unusable. Switches limit the collision domain and once the switch ARP table has been populated then the broadcasts on a network can be kept to a minimum.

If possible, try to stack hubs together instead of daisy chaining since the backbone of the stack travels at a much higher rate of speed. Practically speaking, on a network with normal traffic I would be surprised to find that three or more 12-port daisy chained hubs would provide acceptable network performance.

Hope that helps,

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