Had one of these dropped off on my front porch today. Anybody know anything about it?

Samsung web-site / spent a lot of time looking for data, the only thing I could find was a 1998 Press Release that included mention of a 'newer' model (6216) .... [noting that this 6016 item was manufactured in 1997]

Looks to be 'ISP type' hardware, the 'magic' being two 100Mbs channeles and 16 10-Mbs ports. It's the two 100-Mbs channels that have me wondering just what's involved .. why two channels (two ports each) for instance?

Spent over two hours on the phone, probably talked to 20 people, the last one admitting that he knew what I was talking about, but was also surprised that there was nothing available on the web-site ... he suggested writing a letter to the Office of the President at SamSung Headquarters to ask there where any data might exist on this box.

Not quite sure from your description, but I may have an explanation for you.

Early fast ethernet was all 100BASE-T which was half duplex (i.e. single channel over a single twisted pair). This wasn't a problem for most users, but in some applications there was a need for fast bi-directional data exchange. One solution was to make a device with two 100BASE-T connections and tie them together in such a way that they appeared to be a single full duplex interface. One channel for uplink and one channel for downlink.

100BASE-TX came along with full duplex (two channels over two twisted pairs) and made the kit obsolete.

Cat-5 contains 4 twisted pairs, so you could run two 100BASE-TX connections over it, splitting out the pairs to two RJ45s at each end or doing some magic in the NIC.

Near as I can figure, problem is not quite so scary .. it appears that the two jacks on the 100-Mbs channels were provided so as to allow the use of a straight cable or a cross-over cable .... at least that's the best sense I can make out of it thus far ....

It's still a bit crazy that I have come across all kinds of 'news' items about the fact that Samsung was going to make a big splash in the switch/router market when they decided to jump in and grab their share of that money .... but, the only other 'news' seems to be folks looking for drivers for the NICs that aren't identified on the Samsung web-site, the occasional review/listing of a Samsung router, the thousands of repeated postings about a password issue with the 6215 model .. on and on ...

There's a lot of talk about SNMP available with their 'SmartView' software ... but that's another item I have yet to find on any of the Samsung web-sites I've tracked down.

I sent out a couple of queries from their 'Contact Us' web-page forms asking about where the data on discontinued items might be ....

While on the phone with the kid that dropped it off last night ... learned that he'd picked up two of these from a stack of at least 20, 5 NIC cards, 2 cables, for a total price of $10 U.S. ?????? ... anyway, while walking him through various issues on at least three computers he was trying to put together, had him hook one of them up to the one he had ... at this point, can only state that the 16-channel section doesn't appear to throw up a DHCP server .... but does appear to work fine as a hub .... haven't gotten around to powering up the one he dropped off here ...

I'd assume the two 100Mb ports would be for chaining them to switches much like you find dual gigabits on higher end 100Mb switches.

Since you may have a number of device running at 10Mb you wouldn't want a bottleneck where they try to hop to another device so you add a higher bandwidth port to interconnect..