Age-old ethernet equipment

On Mar 29, 6:39, Iggy Drougge wrote: Well, they would really all be the same network -- they'd be all one collision domain (any packet or collision appearing on one port would be seen on all the others. That's what a repeater does). Partitioning segments deliberately, eg to lock out a faulty host -- maybe one that's jabbering, or responding to things it shouldn't -- or an intruder. Monitoring traffic levels (counting packets, octets, collisions, etc). Monitoring traffic types (unicast packets, multicast packets, broadcast packets). Keeping a list of MAC addresses seen. Since all this is usually done by talking to the repeater (or whatever) over the network, the repeater itself has to have an IP address, and so there are ways to set that up (setting it by hand, or telling it to use bootp/dhcp) or upgrade the firmware, or set passwords for read/write operations. which Don't I don't see why, if you're talking about repeaters. Old switches might well be slow, since they work on a store-and-forward basis. A repeater ("hub") works on the bit level; a switch works at the packet level and looks at the type and addressing of each packet before passing it on. Newer switches use ASICs to do this in hardware at wire speed, older ones use more conventional processing (or a combination). Partitioning, is, yes. Segmenting isn't, it's just a way of making one big(ish) hub do the job of a few smaller ones. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager Dept. of Computer Science University of York