I've one of those ordinary Linksys 4 Port Ethernet
routers. If all my ports are full of Macs on Tiger,
and I need more ports to connect more stuff, can I
unplug one device, daisy chain it to another Linksys
router, and connect away?
Thanks in advance!
Home 'routers', such as most Linksys devices, are really a combination of a router and a switch. In your case, you have a router with two ports (the external port you can see and use to plug an Ethernet cable into, which is usually labled 'WAN' or 'Internet' or something similar; and an internal port connecting to the switch) and a switch with five ports (four external Ethernet ports, and one internal port connected to the router's internal port). A switch doesn't care what's hooked up to its Ethernet ports. You can connect anything to them... including another switch. I would
NOT get another router; that will split your network up into subnetworks, and will generate a lot of work for no good reason... unless you
want to put something over on the second subnetwork which is hidden from the rest of your local net. Instead, I'd buy a switch. There are large numbers of Linksys, Belkin, Netgear, 3Com, and many other vendor, 4 and 5 and 8 and 16 and 24 and 48 port switches. If you need, say, a total of 6 ports, buy an 8-port switch. You'll lose one port from the switch on the router, as you'll have to run a cable from one port to the new switch, but you'll get back either 8 or 7 ports, depending on how the switch is built. (The low-end ones will often use Port 1 as the uplink port, more expensive ones will have a dedicated uplink port) That'll give you a total of 10 or 11 Ethernet ports. Plenty of room for your current needs, and room to grow later. You can look for switches at Amazon and CompUSA and similar.
