Troubleshoot some network connectivity problems

You are asked to visit a pharmaceutical company to help troubleshoot some network connectivity problems. The company’s network consists of 11 workstations connected by a single 24 port hub. The company manager describes the problem as consistent and explains that every morning there is a five-minute delay to connect to the main server. The manager indicates that every user on the network has the same problem. Using your protocol analyzer where would you tap into this network and why? Explain how this network is different to modern networks: 

Hubs are normally used to connect segments of LAN. A hub contains multiple ports. it is copied to all the ports of the hub. So the data coming from 11 work stations is copied to 24 ports. Each of this 24 ports can see the data coming from this hub. Devices attached to the hub are 11 and they are on completion to send data through hub. This competition results in a collision. It results in degradable performance. This performance will slow the network.

Let there are 4 work stations connected to hub as below, now one of them wants to communicate with remaining one, if it sends a frame (hub is a layer1 device) to another, as a hub cannot differentiate workstation it will send the frame to all the 4 stations. 

Considering above scenario. Now 11 workstations want to communicate with main server, the amount of data broadcasting is huge (i.e. 11*24*24 data broadcasting). Due to this heavy bandwidth usage, there is a huge delay in network.

We can tap analyzer anywhere in the network that connects to hub because there is no such useful performance improvement with the hub. As workstations get added this data replication within the hub will be more.

In modern network we do not see such a networks. Instead of a hub, we use switches. Following are the main differences between hub and switches

Hub	Switch
Hub broadcasts whatever the data it receives	While switching forwards data to intended destination only
It expands the collision	There is less collision relatively
We cannot use more devices	We can use more devices with using switch
Hubs are unable to differentiate between the devices on the network	Switch can do the differentiation. So that it can work on more devices

What makes switch so special is, it forwards data to the server (assuming the main server is at locally if not we use a router) using mac address (or) hardware address. By forwarding data only to the system to which data addressed, Switch decreases the traffic ( as shown in the below figure). This is not happening in the case of Hub.