Hubs on a NIC (was:Re: what about 48 bits?)
Lamar Owen
lowen at pari.edu
Wed Apr 7 14:24:51 UTC 2010
On Wednesday 07 April 2010 07:18:57 am Joe Greco wrote:
> To me, this is a Dilbert-class engineering failure. I would imagine that
> if you could implement a hub on the network card, the same chip(s) would
> work in an external tin can with a separate power supply. Designing a
> product that actually exhibits a worse failure mode than 10base2 is ...
> strange to me.
I have in my gear museum a fairly large box with a couple of this type of 'hub
on a card' installed. And in this particular case, it made perfect sense, as
the box is an Evergreen Systems CAPserver, and has 16 486 single-board
computers tied to two 8-port hub cards (two ports on each modular plug, too),
with....wait for it... a 10Base-2 uplink. These were used mostly for remote
network access and remote desktop access.
If you want more data on this old and odd box, see
http://www.bomara.com/Eversys/capserver2300.htm
I can see a hub card being useful in an old NetWare server setting, though,
since if the server went down you might as well not have a network in the first
place, in that use case.
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