Heya, Rafael, thanks for your report!  I'm glad your were alert to the imminent failure of that ancient 3COM hub, and willing/able to haul it back to campus.  As described in earlier email, we swapped in a fan from yet another of those, but it was still sounding bad.  Russ took both that one and a 16-port switch we had around over to the school on Friday and decided to use that better but smaller one.  

Thanks again,

 ==mitch