[techtalk] router/switch question

[Xp0nential Xp0nential]

Do you have a brand name? or something ? like CISCO 5000 bla bla
maybe that will help us figure out what it is.......

PS: switches are as evil as hubs, specially that you can arp poison behind a switch ;)

Xp0nential

--- "Raven, corporate courtesan" <raven at oneeyedcrow.net> wrote:
>Heya --
>
>Quoth Tania M. Morell (Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 12:18:40AM -0500):
>> No, I'm sure it's a switch and not a hub.  ;)   This activity thing doesn't
>> happen with any of my other computers so I think it may have something to do
>> with the network config on this particular machine but I don't know enough
>> about networks/ips/broadcasts/netmasks/etc to know right off what it is. I
>> guess I'll have to tinker around until I figure it out.
> 
>	It may be the app, too.  (I forget what you said you were doing
>when you saw all that activity.)  Can you run the app on a different
>machine and see if you see the same behaviour?  If so, the app is
>probably just one that uses a lot of broadcasts, and that's why
>you're seeing that activity everywhere.
>
>	Switches 101:  Switches are often called smart hubs.  This is
>because they learn where devices are (Mac address/IP address blah is off
>port foo) by listening to frames they recieve.  So, if they get a frame
>from MAC address foo on port 1 destined for MAC address bar, they store
>the knowledge that MAC address foo is off port 1 in their forwarding
>table.  The next time they have a frame for foo, they can only send it
>out of port 1 rather than spamming all ports with it.  (If switches
>recieve a frame for an unknown MAC address, they'll generally forward it
>out all ports except the one it came in on.)  As they pass frames, they
>learn where the devices on the local network are, and they send less
>frames to all ports, and more for the particular port that connects to
>the destination device.
>
>	The exception to this -- broadcast frames.  These are frames
>that are *supposed* to go to everyone on the local subnet (a division of
>IP space).  So broadcast frames will appear on every port except the one
>they came in on, every time.  It sounds like this is what's happening
>with your setup.  Broadcast frames have many uses for protocol designers
>-- find all machines on the local network, send a message to all (Router
>going down in five minutes!), search for a particular computer that you
>know is connected but don't know where it is (akin to shouting "Hello?
>Jane?" down every hallway until she shows up), aanouncing available
>services to other devices on a network (a la Novell servers and
>AppleTalk printers), things like that.
>
>	Some applications are more broadcast-intensive than others.  It
>all depends on the software, the protocol stack, and how it was
>programmed.
>
>	If any of this doesn't make sense, please ask.
>
>Cheers,
>Raven
> 
> 
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