Free network scan utility that documents devices?

I'm sure he's going to disagree but here is the correct answer. Hubs were used back in the 90s, before switches became common (since switches at the time were expensive). Hubs aren't used anymore - completely obsolete tech (with an exception for niche cases like packet sniffing), which is why you won’t find them anywhere outside of a computer museum. All they did was take an incoming ethernet frame and broadcast it out of all ports, hoping it reached the right destination. The problem with that is it caused traffic collisions, forcing data to be resent and slowing down the network. Then switches came along and started to become more affordable. They operate similarly to hubs but with some brains (Layer 2 capabilities). Instead of sending traffic through every port, a switch learns the MAC addresses of connected devices and forwards the frame only to the correct port. An unmanaged switch is just a switch that can’t be managed - no interface, no configuration. Just plug and play. It runs with a basic default switch setup, and that’s all there is to it. Managed switches have a MAC address and an IP address so their management interface can be accessed. This intelligent guy seems to think unmanaged switches are hubs because they don’t have a MAC address - but that’s only because they don’t need one. Since unmanaged switches don’t have an IP address (they’re not endpoints and have no management interface), no traffic is directly intended for them. That’s why you won’t find them in an ARP table and why they aren’t discoverable on the network. However, unmanaged switches still operate at layer 2, forwarding frames based on MAC addresses - just like managed switches.