Extended Star Topology

Heres a tricy one for your guys, new to this site but so far it looks awesome, maybe i can help yous or others in the futrue as yourself and others can try to help me just now.

I am doing a project, i have 6 departments but what i em concerned with or is confusing me is this.

I will have 82 hosts in one department, the hosts will be conected to a centralised hub but i dont think i can get a 82 port hub so i think i will have to use around 4 hubs, but are the hubs then connect to one switch then the switch to a router?

If not how would this physical topology be made up???

Appreciate your help guys if yous can work this one out for me

Peace

If your stuck with the hubs then yes, the 4 hubs will need to be connected to the switch using crossover cabling. Then you would use a straight through cable to connect the switch the router's ethernet.
One question, is there going to be only one switch between the router and the 6 departments?

thats a good question, i haven't thought about that yet to be honest. would it be better to have just the one switch?

I'm not stuck with the hubs though, i think i will probably use switches in each department instead, i have been looking at the 3 com super stack range.

What you do think? Thank sfor the prompt reply as well

If you still were stuck with the hubs, I would suggest a small switch in each department which then connects to the main switch. This makes for a smaller collision domain and increases bandwidth by segmenting each department. But, if I had the budget I would go for an all switch topology so you can utilize a full-duplex environment and not worry about the shortcomings of having a large collision domain and some of the insecurity that hubs bring to a network.

Ok so tell me if this will work please:

I will have the hosts in each department connected to switches, use the 3com super stack range for departments with lots of hosts, then have the one switch within each department connected to one main switch which is then in turn connected to the router.

Will that work?

Thanks for help

Sounds like a plan to me, but heres a little advice on my part. For the links between each departmental switch and the main switch, I would suggest going for a few redundant connections coupled with a gigabit ethernet full duplex link between them all. Of course, you cant have EVERYTHING top notch in your network, but that was just a mild suggestion