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Not bad. Unfortunately he's inconsistent with a few key terms that could cause confusion. Use of repeater instead of hub (although he does use repeater hub in

by EricE 6y ago

Not bad. Unfortunately he's inconsistent with a few key terms that could cause confusion. Use of repeater instead of hub (although he does use repeater hub in the collision domain section) would probably cause confusion with many since the term "repeater" is very rarely used (except for the EARLY days); hubs had far greater usage than repeater. More problematic for me is liberal use of bridge, especially when there are multiple connections. I think his diagrams would be more useful if he established early on that a switch is just a fancy multi-port bridge, and then just use switch for bridge from then on. I get where he was going, but if you are trying to reach more of a layman audience then sticking to more "trade" terminology would probably be less confusing to potential readers.

musicale 6y ago
Peterson & Davie's excellent (and free) "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach" prefers switch (claiming the bridge term is "historical") but offers this rather brilliant comment: > But whether we call the device a bridge or a switch—and the network you build an extended LAN or a switched Ethernet—the two behave in exactly the same way. Which is to say the difference between an Ethernet switch and an Ethernet bridge is its name rather than its behavior. They also correctly note that "switch" and "switching" are more abstract terms that apply to a wide range of devices (which would seem to make "bridge" and "bridging" a bit more precise and descriptive.) In my own experience the bridge term is still commonly used by networking practitioners to describe the devices, and transparent bridging is used to describe the behavior, e.g. 802.1D.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  From O'Reilly's Ethernet by Spurgeon (1e, 2000), Chapter 18 has: > Ethernet bridging technology was first delivered in the mid-1980s, typically in the form of a two-port devices that could help segment a large Ethernet into separate Ethernet Lans. The devices linked two LANs, forming a bridge between them, hence the name. […] A device with more than two ports of bridging became know as a switching hub. Nowadays, even two-port bridges are often called switches. > At their most basic level of moving frames from one LAN to another, bridges and switching hubs operate identically. The major difference is in the increased number of ports and the enhanced capabilities of switching hubs, which led to a change in the marketing of these devices. Vendors wanted some way to differentiate a low-end bridge that just does basic bridging from the more expensive and flexible switching hub products that provide many more ports and more capabilities than basic bridges. Circling back to Chapter 2: > There is another kind of hub called a switching hub. Switching hubs use the 48-bit Ethernet destination addresses to make a frame forwarding decision from one port of the switch to another. As shown in Figure 2-3, each port of a switching hub provides a connection to an Ethernet media system that functions as entirely separate Ethernet LAN. * https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-the-definitive/1565926609/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-the-definitive... There's a second edition of the book (2014): * https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-the-definitive/9781449362980/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-the-definitive... as well as the book Ethernet Switches: * https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-switches/9781449367299/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-switches/97814...

by EricE 6y ago

musicale 6y ago

Peterson & Davie's excellent (and free) "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach" prefers switch (claiming the bridge term is "historical") but offers this rather brilliant comment: > But whether we call the device a bridge or a switch—and the network you build an extended LAN or a switched Ethernet—the two behave in exactly the same way. Which is to say the difference between an Ethernet switch and an Ethernet bridge is its name rather than its behavior. They also correctly note that "switch" and "switching" are more abstract terms that apply to a wide range of devices (which would seem to make "bridge" and "bridging" a bit more precise and descriptive.) In my own experience the bridge term is still commonly used by networking practitioners to describe the devices, and transparent bridging is used to describe the behavior, e.g. 802.1D.

throw0101a 6y ago
From O'Reilly's Ethernet by Spurgeon (1e, 2000), Chapter 18 has: > Ethernet bridging technology was first delivered in the mid-1980s, typically in the form of a two-port devices that could help segment a large Ethernet into separate Ethernet Lans. The devices linked two LANs, forming a bridge between them, hence the name. […] A device with more than two ports of bridging became know as a switching hub. Nowadays, even two-port bridges are often called switches. > At their most basic level of moving frames from one LAN to another, bridges and switching hubs operate identically. The major difference is in the increased number of ports and the enhanced capabilities of switching hubs, which led to a change in the marketing of these devices. Vendors wanted some way to differentiate a low-end bridge that just does basic bridging from the more expensive and flexible switching hub products that provide many more ports and more capabilities than basic bridges. Circling back to Chapter 2: > There is another kind of hub called a switching hub. Switching hubs use the 48-bit Ethernet destination addresses to make a frame forwarding decision from one port of the switch to another. As shown in Figure 2-3, each port of a switching hub provides a connection to an Ethernet media system that functions as entirely separate Ethernet LAN. * https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-the-definitive/1565926609/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-the-definitive... There's a second edition of the book (2014): * https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-the-definitive/9781449362980/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-the-definitive... as well as the book Ethernet Switches: * https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-switches/9781449367299/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ethernet-switches/97814...