So, not quite an upgrade, but I’m very pleased from a nostalgia perspective nonetheless.
I found this beast in a cupboard at work a few months back, but missing its power pack. A few orders from aliexpress later, I finally found a USB (it’s 5v 2A, which is very handy) power cable that fits, and as you can see it still works. I very slowly downloaded a load of updates using it earlier.
The 4 port version of this hub was the very first piece of networking equipment that I ever bought when I was at university, all the way back in 1999. It let my housemates and I play networked Doom, which was pretty cool back then.
Hubs these days are practically useless, except that you can use them for network taps. Not that 10M is going to let you capture much traffic!
This will now live on a shelf somewhere and make me smile whenever I spot it.
I worked somewhere where we had an unusual setup on having some IT being dealt with in house, and some being dealt with by an outside IT company with a lot over overlap...
One day the most senior tech from outside firm came to us as I needed to discuss quite a lot of important issues face to face... When he saw one of those hubs, his eyes light up and was almost begging me if he could have that as he wanted to use it for Wireshark.
Was strange as he was a very serious IT pro but happy with an ancient hub for this, while I would instead get small 8 port Cisco managed switches with port mirroring for this purpose.