I expect I may get a 10/100 hub initially and upgrade the network cards as and when I have a few shillings lying around.

I don't know the environment you're in or what you're planning for the network's usage, but for most home networks, 10mbps is more than enough. I wouldn't even waste the cash on a 10/100 hub at this point.

The main problem I see is that at the minute, some of the computers are spread around the house (although 3 + the empeg will be in one room!)

Sounds exactly like my house. I was so happy when I finally networked my computer, my wife's computer, and my daughter's computer. Now we can share files, print to each other's printers, and (when I get broadband to my house someday) share a 'net connection.

Some hubs can have a BNC connector in addition to the RJ45s, so could I have a couple of machines running off the hub's BNC connector with the rest on RJ45?

Damn, that's a good question! I've never tried that. I've either been all-RJ45 or all-BNC, but never a mixture. Does anyone have experience with this? Even the cheap hubs seem to have a BNC connector, too. I always assumed that plug was for daisychaining hubs and not for mixing 10baseT networks with coax networks. But I never tried.

The empeg is only 10Mbs anyway as I recall, would that not cause problems on a 100BaseT network?

Only if you get a hub that will ONLY do 100. Then none of your 10 stuff will work on it. If you get a hub that'll autosense between 10 and 100, it should be OK. Of course, I think someone said that the cheap hubs will throttle back the whole network to 10 if there's any 10s plugged into it.

(I set up the network at home on the cheap several years back, and coax has served me ok so far, so I have never had to worry about 10/100/RJ45/hubs etc hence all the questions!)

I tried doing some LAN parties with coax, and although it "served me OK" too, it was a bitch to set up an ad-hoc network that way, and it always took two hours before all our machines could see each other. When we switched to 10baseT, suddenly setup went from hours to minutes and everything worked like a charm.

Of course, if you can get the "mix" thing working with the BNC connector, you'll be sitting pretty. I'll tell ya, for someone with "only-coax" experience, you seem to know a lot about 10baseT. For instance, knowing that a crossover cable is required when you connect two computers directly to each other: That's something most 10baseT newbies don't know about. I'm impressed.

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Tony Fabris