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On Friday 31 August 2001 2:05 pm, James Oakley wrote:
On August 31, 2001 10:38 am, Timothy Reaves wrote:
It's not a matter of being hostile, only being accurate.
There is no such thing as a switching hub; this stuff is very well defined. As a person stated, what you might have is two hubs in the same box with a segment to link the two.
Small differnece, but a difference none-the-less.
Sometimes, 'switching hub' means an unmanaged desktop switch.
It's bad terminology. A hub broadcasts traffic along its backplane. A switch doesn't. If a hub does something more than just broadcasting (e.g. dual-speed, or SNMP compliance, or similar), then you can call it a 'smart hub', but you *shouldn't* call it a 'switching hub'. I worked as a tech support for 3Com for 4 years, and came across a classic example of this... The bog-standard 10Mbps 3Com hub was called the FMS (flexible media stack) II, until it got renamed the Superstack II Hub 10 in 1996. In autumn 1996, 3Com used some of the old Chipcom technology to produce a smart hub; they thought it would replace the Hub 10. This thing had 4 backplanes, all at 10 Mbps; and you could move ports from one backplane to another, so you could have, say, 20 people on one backplane (sharing 1 10 Mbps segment!) and 2 or 3 'power users' on another segment. It was a nice little toy, even if it was technically obsolete by the time they released it (and *way* overpriced). But they had the *idiocy* to call it the Superstack II Port Switch Hub. So people, looking to buy a switch, saw 'switch' in the title; and this thing was cheaper than switches were then (since it was a hub, to all intents and purposes). So people bought them, then discovered that they had just bought rather expensive hubs instead of switches. At which point they usually returned them, along with some really nasty letters. (The phone calls were fun, too. For those of us working on the helldesk.) People who wanted hubs generally stuck with the Hub 10, since everyone knew it. The Port Switch Hub sold almost *no* units, since it fell between two stools, and was confusingly named. So, to try and sell them off, they renamed them; the Port Switch Hub became the PS Hub 40 (since it had 4 x 10Mbps backplanes), and had the price slashed (to the point where it was cheaper than the Hub 10). It never really sold well; and it certainly didn't replace the Hub 10 (as it was supposed to in 1997). 3Com had to continue selling both of them; it couldn't afford to junk the PS Hub, and people still wanted the Hub 10. If you go to 3Com's web site, and look up 'managed hubs' in the product section, you will find both of them, both still available, and left high and dry by the vast numbers of cheap switches you can get nowadays. That's a classic example of why bad terminology (when talking about switches and hubs) can be a really stupid thing to do; even if you're a big company. Gideon.