[124885] in North American Network Operators' Group
Hubs on a NIC (was:Re: what about 48 bits?)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lamar Owen)
Wed Apr 7 10:26:15 2010
Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2010 10:24:51 -0400
From: Lamar Owen <lowen@pari.edu>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <201004071118.o37BIvK1022393@aurora.sol.net>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
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.
