We have a number of custom computer systems that need to be networked and temporarily installed around a football stadium - each computer has it's own network switch. These computers all need to be networked to a central computer. Up to this point, we've been daisy chaining the switches so as not to exceed cable length limits and putting the server in the middle of the chain with 5 computers/switches going off on one chain, and 5 going off in another chain and everything has worked great. I checked network utilization on the server when looking at the network traffic from one computer, the utilization was about 0.13% of the gigabit connection, and all of the switches at each computer located throughout the stadium are gig switches.
We're running into some situations where we need to increase the number of computers/switches and possibly move the server to the end of the chain, meaning the server could be at the end a chain of 20 switches. Home-runs are not an option due to exceeding gig network cable lengths (300ft) and fiber would be much too costly.
So, I know that it's not recommended to daisy chain network switches, but I haven't read anywhere hard and fast that says you can't do it. Further, there is no other traffic on this network other then those computers which send small amounts of data over the network to the server.
Besides not being recommended for a standard office network (which this is not), will we run into any major issues? When daisy chaining multiple switches, is it just a matter of excessive traffic on the uplinks closest to the server, or are there other switch routing/timing/processor issues that we would run into?
Thanks! Mike