Gigabit hubs -- do they exist? (or was I halucinating)

[x88x]

We don't need all the traffic on the entire network, just all the traffic going to and from the systems on the one device. I think I'll just try doing a bridge to a switch; probably cheaper to buy 2 gigabit NICs than a network device that would do what we need anyways.

[Airbozo]

Uh, no. For a switch to be a switch it must operate as a multiport bridge (use MAC address "routing") otherwise they are Hubs and they are being mislabeled (x88x has is right). Hubs are just a multi port repeater. I have never seen a hub faster than 10/100 (probably due to the requirements for gigabit).

When you say it keeps messing with the rest of the network, what do you mean?

Hmm, then it was explained to me incorrectly by several different network guru's. I am not a network guy by any stretch so I could have misunderstood them. Network switches are sold as managed and unmanaged with the managed ones being way more expensive.

Now I have more reading to do... lol

[x88x]

Hmm, then it was explained to me incorrectly by several different network guru's.

Not entirely surprising; no offense to your gurus, it's just that it is a very commonly misunderstood thing these days. Basically, a hub sends all traffic that it sees to all ports. Because of this, any device on a hub can see all traffic to and from all other devices on that hub. However, as a result of this, the available bandwidth is divided among the devices on the hub (ie, if there are 5 devices on a 10/100Mbps, each only gets 20Mbps bandwidth) and there is a danger of packet collisions. Because of all three of these reasons, 99% of the time, switches are much preferable.

Because hubs operate on level 1 of the OSI model, they only know about the electrical impulses coming over the wire, and just spit those electrical impulses out everywhere that they can, hoping that they get where they're supposed to. Switches on the other hand, operate on level 2 (or sometimes level 3 in the case of managed switches), so they can read the packet headers and see what IP address the packets are supposed to go to. Using the ARP data available to them, the can use that to find out the MAC address of the device that the packet is supposed to go to. Since it is operating on level 2, it knows which devices have which MAC addresses, so it can send the packets only to the desired location. Like I said, 99% of the time, this is exactly what you want from a switch, but every now and then.....

mtekk, I just realized that in my previous post I forgot to answer your question; basically, the reason that I need to monitor the traffic on these systems is that we need to have a record of all the traffic that went to and from these systems over a certain period of time.