A Fine Day at the Flea Market

[Jay32]

The weather was great and the flea marketing was superb. Walked away with (2) 3Com® SuperStack® II Dual Speed Hub 500 Managed 12-Port and (1) 3Com 8-port hub all for some pocket change.

Both the SSII's power up and selftest just fine, so I tested them with my home network (just three systems sharing a dial-up with a 10Mbps 4-port). Two of the systems worked fine but the third showed a flashing green LED indicating that it was disabled due to a network loop. Repeated the same behavior on both SSII's and on all ports but the system in question works fine on my generic 4-port.

All pc's have the same 10/100 NIC's. Could it be a bad cable that is only showing up when I try to run at 100?

[Jay32]

OK, answered my own question. I found enough cable to make another run and it works fine now. Just seems odd that the old Cat5 cable worked fine on the 10Mbps hub but not on the 100Mbps hub.

[glc]

It was probably not up to true Cat5 standards.

[Jay32]

http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/d...sku=3C16610-US

Wow,
Why are these hubs still so expensive? Mwave list them for over $600. Is it because of the management capabilities? And can I access the SNMP or any other management function without the management module?

[mbossman2]

that hub is a fully manageable hub, which makes it quite expensive.

The management module gives advanced SNMP (I would assume that without it you would have basic) and full RMON support (assume again basic or truncated without)

It also appears to have, as an option, some additional toys that allow for increased uptime for use in an enterprise environment.

Not a bad buy.

[Jay32]

Thanks for the info bossman, sounds like serious overkill for my simple home network. How would one go about accessing the "basic" SNMP, I couldn't find anything in the documents that came with it.

Looks like I'll be heading over to ebay!!

[mbossman2]

most network devices like this can be managed by pointing a browser at the assigned IP address and that activates the management piece, or you will need to connect to the console port with a console cable.