[Sussex] Re: Sourcing list of hardware

[John Crowhurst]

On Tue, October 24, 2006 23:18, Geoff Teale wrote:
> Nothing much to add except for two observations:
>
> - Given the price point I'm surprised they bother to sell hubs at all
> these days.

If the network isn't IP based, either older NetBEUI or Mac DDP networks
for example, you can't use a switch because there is no mac address used
to communicate. You need a layer 1 device.

> - In my experience really cheap switches occasionally crash and need to
> be power cycled, hubs don't do that (there's nothing clever in a hub).

Really expensive switches also crash sometimes, and Demon's earlier
bridges used to run out of memory and drop packets. In bigger networks,
redundant switches are used in case one fails.

--
John