A Curious Little Terrapin

[Terron]

Could someone please enlighten me as to what switches, routers and bridges do? I've seen these mentioned allover, and I don't know what they do http://www.wireplay.co.uk/ubb/smile.gif

-A Curious Little Terrapin

[Russdy]

Terron m8, too much to say here. They do lots of heavy networking ****, and make big networks possible and more efficient.
Find me in 9 weeks, and bring me a b33r and ask me fact to face, and Ill give you a rundown m8.

Russ

[Wizzo]

ok, here we go :-)

A switch is best thought of as a "postman". With a normal hub every signal that is received is repeated to every other port (hence the term "repeater"). However, this means that everyone on that hub is sharing the same bandwidth, i.e. someone talks, everyone gets the information, even if they don't want to hear it.

Switches memorise who is on which port, and when they receive a packet they only send it to the port that it has to go to, meaning everyone else isn't bothered by the information. In this way, every port on the switch has "dedicated" bandwidth.

Routers are the next step up, and are used to sit between networks, such as on the internet. They delve deeper into the packet (thus incurring a little bit of extra latency) and then send it to the relevant network. The key difference here is that routers can also regenerate a packet into a new format, such as when you have two different types of networks interconnected. They could be thought of as the "translators" of networks.

Bridges are just basic links between networks, a much cut-down version of a router and unable to do all the nifty stuff.

I hope that explains the basics. As many of the network guys will say, this can be rambled on about forever and a day. Indeed, there are entire books written on LAN topology.

Anyway, if this isn't clear shout and I'll try again :-)

[Lord Satan]

Aw, ya git Wizzo, no free beer for Rus now http://www.wireplay.co.uk/ubb/smile.gif

Never mind Russ, I'll buy you one. Then you can tell me aaaall about it (hey, I'll have to sleep for a couple of hours http://www.wireplay.co.uk/ubb/wink.gif)

[Terron]

Whoa - thanks Wizzo! Kinda makes my little coaxial network at home look like a small thing.
And it is :0)