Warren Kumari wrote:
On Jul 29, 2008, at 10:43 PM, Darryl Dunkin wrote:Hubs sure are fun...This might be a stupid question, but where can one get small hubs these days? All of the common commodity (eg: 4 port Netgear) "hubs" these days are actually switches.What I am looking for is: Small enough to live in my notebook bag (e.g.: 4 port with a wall wart.) Cheap Simple 10/100/1000MbpsWhile a tap would work, I'd prefer a hub because I can then use it to connect machines together in a pinch.
D-Link sells a smallish 8-port managed Gigabit switch that allows you to disable learning on the ports -- DGS-3200-10 -- http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=0&pid=674 I don't know where they hide the manuals on the D-Link US site, but Google turned them up on their Russian ftp server ?? While not incredibly cheap, it seems reasonable at about $300. As a bonus, it seems to have pretty complete IPv6 support. We wanted to do something similar with a 10G switch (SMC8708L2). It let's you set the size of the MAC table, but not to zero. However, we found that setting the size of the table to 1 entry effectively disabled learning.
W ---In the past I have bought some cheap 4 port commodity switches (form Circuit City or somewhere similar), found the datasheet for the chipset (it was a Broadcom something or other) and tied the pin to ground that disables the learning mode (actually, I think that the pin just set the size of the learning table to be 0 entries). While this works, doing it once was more than enough :-)
Nice hack!
