On Wednesday 07 April 2010 07:18:57 am Joe Greco wrote:
To me, this is a Dilbert-class engineering failure. I would imagine that if you could implement a hub on the network card, the same chip(s) would work in an external tin can with a separate power supply. Designing a product that actually exhibits a worse failure mode than 10base2 is ... strange to me.
I have in my gear museum a fairly large box with a couple of this type of 'hub on a card' installed. And in this particular case, it made perfect sense, as the box is an Evergreen Systems CAPserver, and has 16 486 single-board computers tied to two 8-port hub cards (two ports on each modular plug, too), with....wait for it... a 10Base-2 uplink. These were used mostly for remote network access and remote desktop access. If you want more data on this old and odd box, see http://www.bomara.com/Eversys/capserver2300.htm I can see a hub card being useful in an old NetWare server setting, though, since if the server went down you might as well not have a network in the first place, in that use case.