Robert,
> Robert's point about only being able to daisy chain up to 2 switches
> is incorrect.
No I said 3 (three) but I cannot find documentation to back up what I had
thought.
Sorry about misquoting you. I meant 3 :-)
I think the following is OK..........
P S----------------------------Switch2--------------------Switch3
R W---------------------------Switch4--------------------Switch5
I I----------------------------Switch6--------------------Switch7
M T---------------------------Switch8--------------------Switch9
A C---------------------------Switch10------------------Switch11
R H---------------------------Switch12------------------Switch13
Y
but not............
S-------Sw2------Sw3-----Sw5----Sw6------Sw7----Sw8------Sw9-----Sw10
W-----------Switch4
I
T
C
H
Either way would still work. Before we put in 2 central gigabit
switches and had all the others linking to them, our network was all
one big chain. We had no redundancy, and some devices had to go
through several switches to get to their destination. Very ugly.
Don says:
IIRC switching is done at MAC level. Each switch only has so much
memory in it to remember where the MAC addresses are for other switches.
This is why you can only daisy so many together.
We use all Cisco gear. I don't know about other brands, but check this out:
switch01#show mac-address-table
Dynamic Address Count: 116
Secure Address Count: 0
Static Address (User-defined) Count: 0
System Self Address Count: 49
Total MAC addresses: 165
Maximum MAC addresses: 8192
Non-static Address Table:
...
We can store 8192 MAC addresses in each of our switches. In Nick's
case, even with the cheapest switches on the market, I don't think his
small network is going to exhaust the MAC address tables.
--
Later
David Kirk
