switch and hub question

[James Knott]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 10:15:20AM -0400, Charly Baker wrote:
> 
>>On Monday June 7 2004 8:43 pm, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>>
>>There are some good reasons to prefer a hub to a switch for a home network, 
>>the most important to me is that if there is a problem and I have to diagnose 
>>it one of the first things I want to do is to plug into the hub and watch the 
>>traffic between the machines that are having the problems.  You lose this 
>>option with a switch.  Even if you aren't diagnosing a particular problem it 
>>can be very interesting, educational, and sometimes even useful just to sit 
>>and watch the traffic.  It beats TV by a long shot.
> 
> 
> I have never had a case where running tcpdump on both of the affected
> machines wasn't good enough.
> 
> Besides if you are desperate, get a PC with two NICs and set it up as a
> bridge.  Now you can really see what is going on. :)
> 
> No, hubs are really dead.

I have often though that one of those dual speed hubs, with the switch 
between the sides would be useful for this.  Just set the monitoring 
computer to the same speed as the monitored computer, so that they're 
both on the same hub.

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