Realistic. And, believe it or not, I know of at least one organization that plans to convert an entire literal skyscraper of office space from routed networks to a single, flat switched network for all the employees of all the subcompanies. In 2023.
Obviously everyone with a bit of braincells left tells them to not do that because it's utterly dumb, but hey, strategic decision by the holding company to save on costs...
At least they're not using hubs. (For the younger generation: a hub is an Ethernet device that takes any packet it ingests in one port and sends it out to all other ports, with no consideration at all if the device that the packet is destined for actually is on that port - something a switch does, by maintaining a mapping of MAC addresses to ports. Extremely dumb devices, but used to be way faster and especially cheaper than switches in the 90's/early '00s)
I still keep an old 4-port hub in my junk-box because that way I can diagnose/snoop on network traffic... Although so much of it is encrypted these days that it's harder to see what's going on.
P.S.: Yes, modern alternatives would be to to buy a switch and that can be configured to "mirror" packets onto a chosen port, or a smalls Ethernet network tap unit... But why buy more stuff if I don't really need to?
Realistic. And, believe it or not, I know of at least one organization that plans to convert an entire literal skyscraper of office space from routed networks to a single, flat switched network for all the employees of all the subcompanies. In 2023.
Obviously everyone with a bit of braincells left tells them to not do that because it's utterly dumb, but hey, strategic decision by the holding company to save on costs...
At least they're not using hubs. (For the younger generation: a hub is an Ethernet device that takes any packet it ingests in one port and sends it out to all other ports, with no consideration at all if the device that the packet is destined for actually is on that port - something a switch does, by maintaining a mapping of MAC addresses to ports. Extremely dumb devices, but used to be way faster and especially cheaper than switches in the 90's/early '00s)