>On Sun, 25 Feb 2001, C.M. Weaver wrote:
>
>> Am I correct in stating that a managed or "smart" hub maintains MAC address
>> tables along with port number information to forward packets to the
>> appropriate destination?
ElephantChild <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>Not as I understand these terms. What you describe is a switch or a
>bridge. A managed hub would have an embedded SNMP agent. A smart hub
>would have some kind of configuration capability to enable or disable
>ports, set global parameters (eg, address of management console, SNMP
>community) or per-port parameters (eg, enable/disable, speed).
>
>Or it could be that someone's been spouting Marketingese at you. :-)
The last seems most reasonable.
"Hub" isn't a precise technical term (nor, for that matter, is
"switch"). The general meaning of hub in the Cisco context, however,
is a layer 1 multiport repeater. The only "smart" things that apply
to such a device are management functions.
MAC address information is layer 2, so a device that's aware of it is
a bridge, not a hub. Bridges can have differing degrees of
intelligence, and I would agree that an SNMP-manageable bridge is
smarter than one that is not remotely manageable.
There's no good technical reason to do so, but bridges that are aware
of VLANs, filtering, etc., tend to be called switches. There are
non-SNMP-manageable switches that I suppose could be called "dumb".
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