Router and Their Limit?
 

I have an SMC Barricade and it says it can support 255 computers. It's wireless, but only has 4 ports on it. Does that mean it can support the 4 and then 251 wireless computers? I would much rather have the computers wired, so is there a way to daisy chain another router or something to get them all working?

Technically your router can hand out 253 IPs through its DHCP server, whether it be through wireless or ethernet, it doesn't matter. You can buy a switch and plug in into your router, most routers/switches these days should have auto-sensing ports so you may not need to worry about the following but just as an FYI. To use a standard ethernet cable, the switch will need to have a uplink port if it doesn't have auto-sensing ports or if it doesn't have a uplink port you will need a cross-over cable to connect the two devices together.

So two routers wouldn't help me at all?

Lets take a step back for a sec and answer what is a router. Lets stick to Cable/DSL routers in this case. These type of hardware devices route internet bound packets from your internal (private) LAN to the outside WAN (your ISP).

So how would this help you? Short answer, it won't, as mentioned above you need to connect a switch to one of the four ethernet ports on your router.

I know what a router is. I don't know what a switch is. I have a few routers, and what I was using them, the WAN went to the modem and the computers plugged into the ports. I was kinda hoping that if I plugged in all the computers in the ports, then plugged the WAN from the one router into the port of another, it would let me connect multiple routers. Kind of like each router has 4 inputs and 1 output. Then I just make the 1 ouput be an input on the other router.

It may work that way but its not proper, switches are very inexpensive these days. There's two problems I see with that configuration.
1. DHCP scopes being the same, which can cause conflicts.
2. Not having the ability to access computers behind the second router.

Here's a solution if you really don't want to buy a switch, kind of goofy in my opinion since you would only be gaining three ports but you don't have to hook it up to the WAN port on the second router. Hook up the second router by itself first, login to the web interface and disable DHCP and the WAN port if possible, then you can connect the two routers together without having to worry about IP conflicts through the LAN ports.

I'll try that first before thinking about a router. Would I connect the two by having the port of one go to the port of the other, would I still use the WAN as the output and a port of the other as the input?

You would be going from a LAN port on the first router to a LAN port on the second router, you won't be using the WAN port. If it doesn't work you and you still want to do it this way you will need a cross-over cable. I'm pretty sure the newer Linksys routers will auto detect this type of connection but I'm not sure about other manufacturers.

If you have that many devices on one router couldn't that slow down the connection for everything and increase pings accross the network even?

If you were to hook up 253 devices of course it would cause a lot of networking congestion resulting in high latency. Now as for connecting a few Ethernet devices together to make a bigger network, no.

Tomorrow is the big day. I will attempt to redo my network. Just incase I can't get anything to work, is a switch and hub the same thing? Would this be the thing I need:
http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-5-Ports-Ethe...QQcmdZViewItem

Switches and hubs are definitely not the same. Any traffic sent to a hub is broadcasted to every computer connected regardless of whether or not they requested it or not. This can make a VERY congested network when you are doing high traffic tasks like transferring files or multiplayer gaming over your LAN.

Switches offer much better network performance then hubs. A switch inspects each packet and uses a MAC Address table stored in the switch to determine exactly what device the traffic goes to.

I have my network done the way I needed it to be for testing, but since the downtime today, I spent most of today in the corner crying.

I still don't fully understand what I need. A hub broadcasts to everything, a switch doesn't, so what's a router? If you needed to do this, what thing would you be buying, the exact make and model (and a link to newegg.com or somewhere were I could buy that thing, if you have a link)?

I have two d-link routers. I set router to 192.168.0.1 and the other router to 192.168.0.2 and that seems to work. I just connected them by connecting one router to the other from one LAN port to the other with a normal cable. The secound router does not seem to do anything but add ports. I did not have to setup port forwarding or the firewall or anything on the secound router. I think it must sence the other router because the other router has ports blocked and then port forwarding and everything for the server.

Is it going to slow down my server by having it go through two routers and then out to the internet?

Mostly all residential-grade routers these days have atleast a 4 port intergrated switch. I would just buy a switch to connect up to one of the ports on your current router.

Only if you go through the WAN port on the second router, thats the only time you will need to worry about forwarding ports. You won't notice any speed difference going through the second router.

ok I will leave it then.

You can test it yourself by pinging your main router from your server, if your getting typical LAN results of 0-10ms its fine.

I am pinging my server and getting <1ms