22 Apr
2002
22 Apr
'02
9:36 a.m.
Pete Turnbull wrote:
On Apr 21, 2:34, Chad Fernandez wrote:
My two pence worth...
I'd not touch 3Com with a bargepole if I were you, particularly
if it's "commercial grade" you're after. 3Com decided commercial
customers weren't worth their bother some time ago. This is only
a direct problem if their crock-of-!"?% CoreBuilder/SuperStack
boxes bring down your entire network on a regular basis of course.
And only a major problem if one of said boxes going down
automatically crashes the so-called redundant failover.
Unfortunately, 3Com equipment has satisfied both the above
criteria too many times for my liking.
That rant over with, more important piece of advice: If you go for
a used HP switch, and it's advertised as 100Mb/s, make sure it
is actually 100baseT you are getting. HP had their own standard
(100VG) that will not work with 100baseT kit (at least some are
100VG only - they won't even downgrade to 10baseT.)
If it's "commercial" stuff you're after (which I generally interpret
as meaning 19" rackmount kit with redundant failover options
and a whole host of SNMP security holes to close down
before you can actually put into service,) then I'm afraid Cisco
are a good bet.
Other than that, I've got a Netgear hub at home that has
never caused me a day of trouble. And it fits my criteria
of being in a metal box :-). (IMHO, if the case is made of
cheap plastic, then what's inside probably is as well...[*])
Alternatively, you could try building yourself a Teddy Borg:
http://draco.mit.edu/teddyborg/
Cheers,
Tim.
[*] Cheap, that is. Not necessarily plastic. But probably ;-).
--
Tim Walls at home in Croydon - Reply to tim(a)snowgoons.fsnet.co.uk
I'm finally going to work on hooking up a
home network, so I guess I
need a hub. What should I look for? I don't know much about networks
yet. I have potentially 7 computers that I'd like to have connected.
It'll need to be 10Base-T, but 100base-T may be involved too. I
thought
I'd look for something on Ebay, hopefully, not too expensive. Maybe
something commercial grade, However. I thought about something
from IBM
or 3Com, any suggestions??
Go for autosensing 10/100baseT. If you're going to spend any amount of
money, you want to protect your investment by including 100baseT
capability
even if you don't need it right now.
If you see a decent modern 3Com hub or switch, that's fine but most
of the
second-hand stuff I've seen is 10baseT only. I wouldn't bother
looking for
IBM. Baystack, 3Com, HP, Cisco are the ones you're likely to see. And
Netgear, which is almost entirely unmanaged kit, but quite good quality.