🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <KdtUJGAx0x83EwVT@ch-w.demon.co.uk>, John Chapple <jc@ch-
w.demon.co.uk> writes
>The disadvantage of the dual speed hubs is that _everyone_ either runs
>at 10baseT or 100baseT, depending on the settings on the cards (as
>well).

Most of the dual speed hubs I have seen do not work like this.

What I recognise by a dual speed hub is a hub where each port can be
either 10 or 100. Internally all of the 10baseT ports are a logical hub,
and all of the 100baseT ports are logically a hub. These two logical
hubs are connected by a two port switch (10 on one side, 100 on the
other). The total bandwidth of the hub is thus 110Mbps (10+100).

One of the reasons why many dual speed hubs are stack-able is that only
one of the hubs needs the switch, so all of the others can do without it
and save some money.

>So you may not get _any_ speed improvement with a dual speed hub, if you
>have one 10baseT card permanently connected to such a network.

If you have a mixture of 10baseT and 10/100baseT cards in your PCs you
should get quite an improvement over just having a 10baseT hubs.

I almost went for dual speed hubs, but the price difference to a fully
switched system was relatively small given the boost in performance, so
I decided to go the switched route.

>The real answer is a fully switched 100BaseT/10BaseT hub

When I replaced our network, I went for a top tier N-way 100baseT switch
which connected all of the second tier switches with all of the servers.
The second tier had 2+8 switches (2x100baseT ports and 8x10baseT ports).
One of the 100baseT ports was used for the up-link to the top tier
switch, one for the machine that needed the most bandwidth. The rest of
the machines were placed on the 10baseT ports.

Going for this structure was far cheaper than trying to have switched
10/100baseT throughout, and also meant that few machines needed to have
their network cards changed. About half of our machines have new enough
network cards to do full duplex, and I still have our old shared hub to
swap in if anything breaks.

We also found switches that are 19" rack mountable, so they just screwed
right into our structured cabling system cabinet. Total installation
time about 20 mins from opening the box to having the network converted
(I swapped everyone over without anyone noticing).


Take care,


Mark.........
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