One of the donations at work today consisted of a few Synoptics hubs. I don't remember exactly which models, but the donation immediately brought to mind the Synoptics 16-port Lattishub 2803 that I bought at the University of Waterloo surplus sale for $3.00. I actually bought 2, but one was problematic.
My Synoptics hub has been put to use under Titan, my main desktop workstation; the hub keeps the tower off the carpet -- in other words it's not really in use.
I decided to do a little investigation and discovered that the Synoptics hubs have a few problems. Apparently they don't like BOOTP much. Microsoft encourages Synoptics owners to upgrade the firmware on the hub, and to use TFTP.
Surprisingly, I couldn't find a Synoptics, or Bay Networks, apparently a newer name, on Google. Everything I read leaves me to believe that they were swallowed by Nortel. If you know, I'd like to know.
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