Most small to mid-sized companies have ripped out their old Ethernet hubs by now and replaced them with cheap, unmanaged Ethernet switches (or more expensive managed switches if they have enough budget room). But does this mean those old hubs are useless and should be thrown out?
Not necessarily! Hubs still have a niche usage in networking environments, specifically for when you need to troubleshoot performance problems using network analysis. If you don’t have managed switches, or switches that are capable of replicating traffic, then those old hubs can be useful for capturing & analyzing network traffic using tools like Microsoft Network Monitor.
So guard those old hubs jealously and don’t let anyone chuck them out!
Mitch Tulloch is a seven-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award and widely recognized expert on Windows administration, deployment and virtualization. For more tips by Mitch you can follow him on Twitter or friend him on Facebook.
