How a Networking Switch Works

[jah]

13 years later and this still helped me alot, thank you!

[carlosrg]

Sometimes I get to smart for my own good and refer back to the basics. Your awesome to dumb it down for me, but you bring back to light the way I learned it in the first place. Thanks.

[CadensNanna]

THANKS GREAT JOB. I am brand new at this field and you help me understand how switches work with your format.

[tcardoable]

Thanks for the lesson. I may be getting into IT recruiting and needed some basic information, thus you provided. It was slow and clear. I did have to look up the difference between a MAC and an IP address. Also, it made me wonder what the difference is between a bit and a byte...brought back what my son taught me about binary. He creates apps for phones. I'm glad there are people out there, like you, who realize not all of us "get it". I appreciate your help. Thanks Again!

[adevgun]

my understanding was that the switch when powered up sends out a ARP request to all ports to find out what macs are sitting on what port and then once the devices reply with the MAC addresses. the switch populates its ARP Table with mac and ip addresses. So when a machine wishes to send data to a machine on the local network, the switch will look up the machine on its ARP table and redirect the traffic so the two machines can initiate a handshake and prepare for data transfer.

[jedrorm]

Not technically speaking, a router just connects two networks. But nearly all modern consumer routers come with built in switches, so you can connect a few devices to it directly.

[slarmas]

A router only needs one connection to the layer 2 network. In order to connect more PC's to a network you would need more switch ports. If you connect a PC directly to the router it would generally (per rules of routing) need a separate network address. IE it could not be on the same network as most routers would give an error that the network already exists. Thus if you want to add more PC's you should put in a bigger switch or uplink another switch taking care not to create loops.

[adevgun]

@Tubekid200 it is possible, however, you will need a second network card. get a usb or pcmcia network card depending on the age of you laptop. next share or bridge the network card connected to uni internet to the second nic. you can use ICS (internet connection sharing) in windows 98, xp, vista, 7. or even install a proxy type software. connect your xbox to the second nic on the laptop. you need to configure ICS so that dhcp is enabled for the xbox to get a ip address from the second nic.

[powerbook]

Broadcast on all the ports except the one that it came in..In this case "2"... Thanks for the video..Simple to understand :)

[rajeshrsutube]

Simple but clear. Also I liked your diagrams. Thank u.

[gleventhal]

Pretty good, but it would gave been nice if you mentioned ARP and possibly what the packets being sent look like a tiny bit.  Basically a little more information on Layer 2.  I liked the video either way, accurate and to the point.

[shatadip]

Of course!! Set multiple APs with same SSID or security settings, then plug them into the same physical network / switch OR set other 9 APs as repeater or WDS mode. Hope it helps!! ATB! :-)

[kaysir]

good video.. with simple diagram.. best for beginner

[Riververchi]

Woah that was simple and really good!! Thank you so much!

[Megamattzero]

MAC Addressing iswith IPv4 only. It is 2013 now. For people new to Networking, we are in IPv6 now because the IP addresses have ran out. IPv6 uses 128 bits of data versus IPv4 that only used 32 bits of IP Addressing data. Just FYI.

[TechnicCreations]

@Heelsey19
They can, the person who told obviously doesn't know what they are talking about. A switch doesn't mean that you 'switch' between computers, it is just like a hub, but more efficient.

[slarmas]

The PC knows what network it is on. IE If it is on 10.0.0.1/24 and the destination is 10.1.0.4/24 it knows 10.1.0.4 is on the 10.1.0.0/24 network and thus instead of sending an ARP request for 10.1.0.4's IP address it sends an ARP request to its Default Gateway. At layer 2 the communication would be between the PC and the router. At layer 3 the connection goes across the router but as far as the switch knows the PC only wants to talk to the router (at layer 2 using MAC address frames)

[DontFindAValidName]

In case of IP it will first issue a ARP request on the network to resolve the IP address to a MAC address. computer B will respond and by then the switch is already aware of the existance of computer B behind port 3. When A sends it first ethernet frame with the newly learned destination MAC address the switch will only send it out port 3.

[BlakeEricksonTV]

Thanks for the comment! It was made for pre-CCNA level engineers.

[joshafool]

Nothing you listed would cause Internet speeds to drop from Mbs to Kbs consistency and only when the switch was added to the network.