Standards

[hyoung7111]

Are there IEEE standards for hubs/switches/routers?
If so . . . what are they?
What I'm tryint to figure out is how do you tell if hub output is poor? Do all manufacturers of hubs follow the same pattern? Is there a test for a port on a hub to determine ouptput? like a fluke test?
Thanks for any information.

[zon]

Not too sure about the IEEE standards on the actual equipment (I believe those standards only apply to protocals like TCP/IP, I could be wrong though).

As far as hubs go, they basically come in 2 different flavors, managed and un-managed.

A managed hub allows you to interface with the device directly, assigning ip addresses to ports, setting port speeds, things of that nature.

A un-managed hub is a dumb device, just put 2 cables into 2 ports and it will pass the data along.

There is really no such thing as "poor" output from a hub, the raw throughput will be the same if you buy one for $30 or $300. The actual throughput is decided by several factors. One, what I talked about above. Two, what other machines you have running on the network. For example, you will get less file throughput if you had 10 NT workstations (because NT relies on NetBIOS, which is a broadcast only protocol, which will broadcast packets everywhere 24/7) than if you were running 10 Windows 2000 workstations , win2k machines use TCP/IP for internetwork communications, and since TCP/IP is a session based NOT broadcast based protocol, they will consume much less network bandwidth, and in turn you will have a lot less packet collisions, and the bottom line is better throughput.

Sorry if that is a confusing answer, hope it helps a little.

[mbossman2]

If you are experiencing issues on your network, one of the 1st things that I would do is take a look at the overall performance of the network. Do this by either using the SNMP features on your hub (if available) or attaching a network analyzer. This way you can monitor, over time, the performance of your network (usage, collisions etc).

Once you have those figures, if your network utilization is consistently above 30-40%, you are experiencing "media contention". You can gain an immediate performance boost by segmenting your network with switches to limit this issue.

HTH