Networking Assistance

If you share the DSL connection in the way I have described, and have the network cards (both in server and in clients) all connected together on your little home LAN, then you don't even need to worry about IP addressing. The default is for automatic allocation and I only made mention of it to pre-emptively clarify a possible issue, that DHCP or automatic IP address allocation is enabled.

That's the beauty of TCP/IP - its so full of functions and yet under certain circumstances it can be made to really behave itself and self configure itself very easily. NAT (technology used to share the internet connection) is great as well about being fairly auto-configuring. At least, in the way Microsoft have implemented it, yes. They've built in an automatic DHCP allocator and all of the other goodies that you need to get everything behaving itself, and all you have to do in Windows 2000 or XP is just tick a box...!!!

Yeah, get all of this home LAN stuff working LONG BEFORE you start cabling your house. Make sure that it works. Make sure that you can surf the internet on the client machine(s) which are not the server, and that all is well there. Understand the concepts that you are trying to impliment before you start to drill holes all over the place and wind up feeding the wrong cable.

I would use straight through cable and a hub - PLEASE - if you are going through a wall or a floor or something. Don't use straight through cable - buy a small hub and use that. You might want to add more internet connected devices, and the crossover cable will really only let you connect one device getting a share of the connection at once - unless you use the uplink port on the hub. But only cable a straight through - yeah, definately. Unless for some reason you can't get a cheap hub and want to make all of this work RIGHT NOW.

I'm thinking of removing my NetGear RT311 router from my network at themoment.
My network is basically as described above but rather than a hub I have two 5 port switches. Will ICN and everything you guys just talked about work the same with an auto-sensing switch? (using straight-thru cabling as well).
cheers!