Connecting two switches

[Rassuke]

Hey!

I'm moving to a new house and I already ran Cat6 cables under the floors to all of the rooms but my question is - Can I connect two switches together so all the pc around the house see each other? I will have one main switch from where one of the cables will run to my office which will have another switch into which my main pc will be connected.

Should I get smart switches or non-smart ones?

I'm going for gigabit connection for now since I don't want to spend extra cash for 10Gbps switches.

 

Cheers!

[homeap5]

You can connect switches together. Or not. All pc around the house will see each other anyway if they're in the same network connected by router or switch. Or by separate switches connected to your router. Or wireless.

[zornzilla]

As long as the switches are all connected to your router then you are fine. you don't need smart switches, unless you have the money for ubiquiti system, then by everything ubiquiti. 

[Rassuke]

9 minutes ago, homeap5 said:

You can connect switches together. Or not. All pc around the house will see each other anyway if they're in the same network connected by router or switch. Or by separate switches connected to your router. Or wireless.

I had a problem some time ago on a lan party where we connected together a router and a switch but the PCs connected to the router couldn't see the PCs on the switch and vice-versa. That's where my question is coming from.

[jj9987]

Hi fellow Estonian.

 

Yes, you can daisy-chain switches. But make sure you do not get a loop in your network (or implement measures that avoid this such as STP), otherwise the whole network will come down.

 

Smart or non-smart, that depends on your use case, networking skills and how much control you want to have over your network.

 

LAN discovery is slightly more complicated and really depends on the network, devices' configuration and the type of application. Often not influenced by the network hardware directly, unless you configure them wrong.

[Rassuke]

4 minutes ago, jj9987 said:

LAN discovery is slightly more complicated and really depends on the network, devices' configuration and the type of application. Often not influenced by the network hardware directly, unless you configure them wrong.

So if I want to be sure that LAN discovery actually works should I get a smart switch or should the "dumb" switches play well too with each other?

[mynameisjuan]

6 hours ago, Rassuke said:

So if I want to be sure that LAN discovery actually works should I get a smart switch or should the "dumb" switches play well too with each other?

If you are looking for just more port always get a dumb (unmanaged) switch. As long as the switch or switches are on the LAN ports of the router they will always be able to see each other.