>>Keeping in mind that our company is under a tight deadline right now, should I switch from coax-peer-to-peer to a switched hub?
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>>We have grown from 6 users to 12, and are starting to see things that might be network problems. Should we just put up with them until the dead line passes, or is it easy enough that the savings should be taken advantage of now?
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>>Thanks!
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>I don't think you could have asked a harder question. If you had not thrown in the tight deadline caveat, the answer is easy -- make the switch and the sooner the better.
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>Then again, if the problems are network related, then you are wasting time trying to modify code to address what is really a network problem. On the other hand, what kind of setup will the end-users have? If their system is going to be similar to what you have now then you need to develop toward that.
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>I have always been a hater of peer-to-peer systems because of [perceived?] unreliability. I did have one bad experience with peer-to-peer so I have shunned it ever since. I established minimum network requirements long ago and have vehemently stuck by them -- 10BaseT [now 100BaseT], Cat5 ethernet cabling, a hub, and a dedicated Novell server [although I will accept an NT server since VFP works great on either platform].
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>With that few computers, switching to ethernet and a hub should take less than a day.

Several problems exist here - you're talking completely redoing the cable plant, and a change in the cable plant does nothing if the problem is server capacity rather than network bandwidth.

If the problem is network bandwidth, then changing the cable plant may help, as long as it's a switch and not just a hub. 10Base2 (thinnet coax) and 10BaseT (10Mbps UTP) have the same bandwidth, and the same contention issues. Even a switch may not help if the need is for the server to handle multiple conversations simultaneously - in which case, putting a second NIC in the server and splitting the net into two segments with the server acting as a brouter might be a better solution.

If the problem is server loading and not cable bansdwidth, then a change in the cable plant is not going to do much beyond eat money. I agree 1000% about peer-to-peer in any kind of a production environment, especially with the cost of hardware so low relative to the overall system cost. I don't even run peer-to-peer environments at home...