Hub/Switch connection

[reason1000]

One of my coworkers was setting up a new office and used an old 10mb hub to connect a couple of HP printers into a switch. He plugged the patch (straight-thru) cable connecting to the switch port into a regular hub port. Printing worked, but was very slow and even timed out every so often. I was troubleshooting the printing problems reported by the users and of course found that the cable was plugged into the wrong port on the hub (the hub has a crossover port) and I corrected that and now printing is working fine.

My question is this. How can I explain why printing was even working in the first place, while the hub was connected through the wrong port? Probably a simple explanation. I just am unsure on why it worked at all. Thanks.

 

[kmcferrin]

The switch was probably smart enough to detect whether the attached device was DTE or DCE and made the switch from straight through to crossover itself. As far as the slow performance and timeout issues, it could be a number of things. If it was a hub it would have been 10 Mbit/half duplex, while the switch may have been set to auto or some other setting. The fact that the switch was having to auto-detect the uplink as well as speed and duplex could have caused some issues with it, as could have spanning tree protocols.

In general it is best to make sure that if you are connecting two pieces of hardware and you know what the speed/duplex settings are that they should be set statically in the switch.