Over the weekend I organized some old computing equipment. I found this beauty in one of my boxes. It's a Netgear EN104TP hub . I've mentioned this device before, in this blog and my books. This sort of device was the last of the true hubs. In an age where cables seem reserved for data centers or industrial facilities, and wireless rules the home and office, this hub is a relic of days gone past. To give you a sense of how old this device is, the Netgear documentation (still online -- well done) offers a PDF created in August 1998. (Again, well done Netgear, not mucking about with the timestamps.) I'm not sure how old my specific device is. Seeing as I started working in the AFCERT in the fall of 1998, I could see this hub being easily over 20 years old. A hub is a network device that accepts traffic from its ports and repeats the traffic to all other ports. This is different from a switch, which maintains a table identifying which MAC addresses are in use on which ports...
