Hubs on a NIC (was:Re: what about 48 bits?)

[Lamar Owen <lowen () pari edu>]

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.