A few months back I went to dozens of shops in Pantip but could not find a network hub. Plenty of switches - but no hubs (there is an inportant difference ).

Luckily, one of the guys I have bought equipment from previously had an old one sitting in the back of his office - which he let me have for a few hundred baht. Not so luckily - it got fried by lightning last week

So, I'm on the hunt for a new or second hand network hub - 4 or 8 port will do. Does anyone know where I can get hold of one in Bangkok ?

I find it hard to believe that hubs are hard to find in Thailand. After all, isn't Thailand the hub of hubs?

Hubs are indeed hard to find today.

They are only practical in small networks, preferably with low network loads.

Nowadays everybody uses switches as much more efficient and not much more expensive.

Bit curious as why you'd need a hub (purely from a technological view )

Bit curious as why you'd need a hub (purely from a technological view )

I develop IP based solutions for a living and I need to sniff what traffic is going between one device and another. If the devices are PC's - that's easy because the packets come through your NIC. However, I use Linksys VoIP adapters and if I need to sniff traffic between say ATA 1 and ATA 2 - I cannot do it with a switch as the packets are only visible between the two IP addresses of the two devices.

With a hub - the packets fly all over the place and are visible to every device connected to the hub. So, traffic flowing between the two VoIP ATA's is visible from the NIC on my PC. I attach Ethereal to the NIC and Voila

So, anyone with an old hub in their bin should dig it out and send it to me immediately !

You should look on eBay.

Or buy a switch that supports mirroring.

Another option is to buy a tap device, although this may be harder to find here in Thailand.

I to am friendly with Wireshark and related tools.

Maybe check out the junk shops in the back corridors of Pantip? They have a lot of old second hand stuff there. What about using a wireless access point/client as one end of your test setup? You should be able to catch everything then.

If you can find a hub, look for a Cisco Catalyst switch on ebay, they're pretty cheap now.

You can set an interface in monitor mode, an option to support sniffers. Besides this, you can also configure from which other ports you want to see the traffic.