Need advice-urgently

I moved into my new dorm room two days ago and to my utter shock and horror, there's only one working ethernet jack in the room for two people. Called the tech people at my school and I was told I had to talk to the building manager. Talked to the building manager and I was told I need to get a splitter. I have a vague idea what that is (I guess it's supposed to take a single jack and expand it into two jacks) so I need to know what exactly I need to get. I got something from amazon.com and it's having delivery issues so I might just cancel the order and file a chargeback on my AmEx.

So I can get an ethernet switch for $20 plus tax or get a splitter (which I have NO CLUE how it's supposed to work) for less than that and risk having bought the wrong thing.

Main problem is that I have no idea what I'm supposed to get (I'd like to avoid getting the ethernet switch if I can-it's bulky) and basically I need to be able to take a single ethernet jack and get an adaptor or something that enables two computers to share that jack. At the same time.

BTW I don't think we're allowed to have wireless....if we were I'd have picked up a wireless router in a snap.

 

Your building manager is probably talking about an unmanaged switch. You can get the same results if you get a cheap router, disable DHCP and all security settings, and then connect it to the ethernet jack using one of the LAN ports on the back of the router. (You can't use the WAN port - remember that little nugget of information.)

 

Most universities do not allow routers but do switches. But routers can be setup to act as a switch. Just turn off DHCP and make the wall connection to the LAN port. But you need to set a Static IP in the router so you can access the routers settings. This is going to be hard since they are probably using the full subnet. So setup the WPA and Assign a strong WPA(2) AES key before turing off dhcp and connect it to the school network. Now if this is not a university dorm you can use a router.