sundance-communications.com/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX Networking Managed Switch or Hub

Does anyone have any recommendations on a specific product or where I can get one. I am in need of a small managed network switch or a small dumb hub. It will be used to monitor network traffic for VoIP applications using Wireshark. I have been calling around to the big box stores and you know where that gets you. The last lady I talked to refered to 10Mbps as 10 megapixel. All I really need is 3 ports, one in, one out, and a monitor pc on the third collecting the data.

You are going to need a hub, not a switch, if chose to monitor all "broadcast" traffic. I suppose that those may be hard to find, but im sure you could find a 5port hub on ebay for next to nothing. Shipping will cost more than what its worth.

A switch will work if it is capable of port mirroring. I found this , that I might check out. If worse comes to worse I'll check ebay but I want to know what I'm getting.

Travis, that looks like a pretty neat lil setup... especially being USB powered. That may make a nice travel HUB, nice find!

On the same note (being a pack-rat) I have two great hubs left, that I use more now, than when I acquired them.

I have an Allied Telesyn AT-TH505BE (5 ports). It is only represented on the packaging as being 10Base-T. It was only used for a short period of time at my home and is back in original packaging with documentation. It even has a manual switch to change one of the ports to an uplink. Man, that is so 90's. From what I can tell, it is truly a dumb hub and is yours for the cost of shipping. Let me know if you are interested.

Cheapest web-managed switch that I know of is the Netgear GS108T. I have used it for VLAN applications, but I checked and it does port mirroring as well. Cost about a hundred bucks, so it might be overkill compared to an Ebay hub.

Since you are already looking at a monitoring PC, why not just build that functionality into it? It would seem that the logical choice would be a PC based router with 2 network cards. It would give you every functionality that you need and would be transparent to the devices you place it between. You wouldn't need to assign it an address and all it would do is store and forward all protocols creating the local capture in the process. If you need to capture more ports, simply put it after the switch. I had a 10/100 Network General Sniffer that worked under this principle and it worked great. The only downside to that method is that it changes the MAC address of the traffic pushed back onto the wire.

That usb powered switch is a cute idea, I almost wonder why they just didn't go to the next level and make it POE compatible or semi compatible and provide an inline cable for extracting power from the POE pins. It is only 5v after all, and at USB spec only 500ma of load max per port.

For a cheap 10/100 hub, I picked up an Asanté FriendlyNet 8 port Hub (FH308) that I can use for the same purpose. They also had a 5 port (FH305) version. be surprised if you can find one though. as Ed mentioned, that 90's technology is hard to find these days. Asanté IS still in business however.

You may have better luck digging up a 3com Dual speed hub, they made so many of them. For odd stuff like this, you are almost better off searching Craigslist using google's command

site:craigslist.org search terms

since Craig's List is the dumping ground for anything that probably wont sell on ebay! :rofl:

Thanks for all the replies and thanks for the offer Ed. I started poking around the storeroom here and found an old 4 port hub.

What's the problem...you don't want 10megapixel?!

Dude, I have a 10 megapixel hub that rocks! It's twice as good as the 8 megapixel one, that came out last year!
:rofl: :rofl: