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Unfortunately the predecessor of my predecessor did **** like this because he had zero budget.
Management from 10 years ago: "We need 3 more APs in the back of the distribution center but we aren't going to give you any money to hire a contractor to run wire. Do it now!now!now!now!now!now!now!now!now!now!"
Network Engineer from 10 years ago: "That's fine, I'll just use the home run on this existing AP as an uplink and hide this hub up in the ceiling. Zip tie the cables to the fire sprinkler pipes aaaaaaaand done! I'm sure I can come back later and rewire this correctly."
Me today: "WHO THE **** DID THIS ****?!"
I'm not our Network Engineer, but I do get to play one from time to time.
Yeah, when they ******* work. Why the **** anyone would hang a chunk of their infrastructure off one is beyond me. Besides, I have a mirror port setup on the catalyst in my office. BITCH I SNIFF WHAT I WANT! Our previous NE set it up for me on our last leg when I started getting into Wireshark. Current NE either doesn't know about it or doesn't care.
We use those all the time. They make great configuration-free monitor ports.
Yeah, back at Harris I always kept a couple around for precisely that reason. All of the stuff we designed (audio consoles and routers) used OC3 for payload transport, but 10/100 ethernet for control.
These days, the good stuff all has configurable snooping, and can even mirror traffic from a single port to a snoop port, which cuts down on the clutter a lot.
Besides, hubs are pretty much a dead product, especially with a lot of stuff requiring 1GbE these days.
OTOH, I'm always amazed when I do something moronically simple like build an RS232/422 tap to intercept serial comms, and everyone acts like I just decoded the Matrix.
Never thought about building a physical Ethernet tap. I mean, not since the 10base2 days, anyway.
If the esoterica of networking and computer security interests you, particularly in the context of the 1980s (Milnet, Tymnet, etc), read the Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll.
Yeah, I'm still at Harris. Not sure how much longer though as Bill Brown keeps cutting our benefits. He has a 30% approval rating (not sure why it's that high) and is #8 most hated CEO. We do have nice things as well, like Ixia taps and Spirent TestCenters. We just happen to have hubs, so why not make them useful. Most of what we do these days is virtualized, though, so we just mirror to a VM.
That's right- I forgot you were a fellow Harrisite.
To be fair, I was with the other Harris, which, ironically, was the original Harris; the one that got sold to Gores Group after the company morphed into a defense contractor, and then split in half and re-named to Imagine and Gates Air. I got out at just the right time- immediately before the split, and 3 months before they shut down the whole Carlsbad operation and made the rather interesting decision to fire all of the engineers and yet attempt to continue selling the PR&E product line.
Ironically, I still deal with Harris stuff every day. At WPIX, our main transmitter was a Harris Platinum:
... here at WGN we have a Diamond primary:
... and a tiny little UAXT backup:
... and of course the NOC is littered with these bastard little devices:
So, while scrolling through some "this connection knows this connection knows this connection" list on LinkedIn I noticed a familiar name, with an unfamiliar face.
It turns out that the police chief for the Metra Commuter Rail system in the greater Chicago area is named Joseph Perez.
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