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Wily_One
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join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA

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Re: [Other] Fast Hub Network? How can this be?

9 years ago a 3Mbps DSL line would have been "blazingly fast", so clearly the gigabit FDDI with your OC3 uplink (or whatever it was; more likely T3) seemed incredible. Enough to mask the inefficient hubs on the LAN. Yeah there'd be collisions for everything plugged into a hub.

But 9 years ago there were also a lot fewer Internet apps than there are today. The web was still pretty new back then, so not as many devices (or apps on each device) were vying for bandwidth.

PowerOfIT
@constellation.com

PowerOfIT

Anon

I may not differentiated the two setups correctly. The HUB network I was talking about was between my first and second year at college. Those are the years I was curious about the setup. So the setup in question I believe was large quantities of these Linksys Hubs daisy-chained together and then one canary box back to a Cisco Fiber switch (I think it was a 2900 series switch but I don't remember and I am pretty sure it was a Layer 3 switch as well as the Class B network was subnetted down to Class C IP address ranges for different buildings and even many subnets in one building.). I know we didn't have any Gigabit at the time (I asked the network tech, he told me 100mb was the fastest thing they had at the time). I remember the ISP connection was fiber, but you are right it very well may have been just a T3, but it looked like some form of OC connection, I honeslty am not sure. I was in their "datacenter" once [if you could call it that, it was pitifull] and they had "bakers racks" with standup servers on them and I think they had as many as 15 in there with one IBM AIX server in it's own rack (that supposedly ran the website). All the servers connected to these Linksys Hubs that were their own subnet (i think it was 147.16.2.x). They also had two Packeteer systems (I think one was a backup) that was used for the internet connection.

I remember Youtube was still very young back then but everyone was downloading from it back then. You would think with all that video streaming data, online gaming, bit torrent stuff, Napster, Kazaa, Streaming Audio, that the network would come to a halt but it never seemed to. I guess the Packeteer helped that a lot.

But the other thing I never understood was how LAN traffic was as fast as it was. I had a network share on my dorm pc to a fileshare server (more than likely one of those upright servers) and i could upload a large file relatively quickly even during high peak hours of the day.

Keep in mind that not all network segments used Canary boxes to link themselves back to the cisco switch.

I know data throughput was different back then but still many people were doing high bandwidth applications back in it's day and the Idea of using hubs everywhere just makes me think that the collisions domains are so large even for their own subnet that I can't help but think that we still should have had large amounts of delay.

Is there anything that could be done at the center switch to alleviate some of this congestion? Forcing smaller frame sizes or larger ones? I don't know if QoS was ever used or not.

Just curious.
PowerOf I.T.
"Ahh....The power of I.T."

shdesigns
Powered By Infinite Improbabilty Drive
Premium Member
join:2000-12-01
Stone Mountain, GA
(Software) pfSense
ARRIS SB6121

shdesigns

Premium Member

A large collision domain is not as bad as it sounds. At my old job, they had the entire corp on one LAN. Ethernet handles collisions well.

We all still got good speeds. The network light was always busy with broadcasts.

Locally we added a router to separate the rest of the LAN. The main reason was to cut down the chatter on the other LAN to make LAN captures more readable.
ZIF
join:2013-09-17
Tyler, TX

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Same principle of over subscription. When I was studying for my Cisco exams their recommendation was 20:1 on the uplinks before you start to see service degrade. Same thing happens on interfaces which is why they have buffer queues so it's transparent. As long as the videos download faster then you watch them you wont see the hickups. No one was streaming HD back then too lol.