We did this in an office where we were stuck with 1 port in each room, and we put a 100Mb switch in each room. It was OK for basic tasks, web surfing, email, etc – but the BIG downside is that if you start doing heavy network traffic (for example, copying a multi-gig file … Read more
A switch doesn’t know about IP. Switches forward Ethernet frames. They don’t need to know anything about the protocols at higher layers. If it is a managed switch it may have a web interface used to configure the switch over IP. Such an interface could support IPv4 or IPv6 or both. However which IP protocol … Read more
The HP ProCurve 1810-8G Switch (J9449A) is an 8-port Gigabit switch that can be powered by an upstream PoE switch. I use it in environments where I can’t accommodate a power brick or need to control power from a central location (e.g. a UPS in a central server room). They’re also nice when you need … Read more
I can’t speak to American pricing, but if there is a HP ProCurve Switch in your price range then you might want to take a look. I’ve found their products to be keenly priced (in the UK anyway), great performers, and very well supported products with a very good guarantee. I’m not personally a fan … Read more
No. If your unmanaged switches are so simple that they don’t do Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), connecting the second cable between them would cause a bridging loop, instantly saturating your network, making your network unusable until you remove the second cable. If they do do STP, then only one of the switch-to-switch links will be … Read more
CATx are physical cable wiring standards, specifying physical wiring characteristics of the cable, like impedance, number of conductors, twist rate, etc. Switches do not care about the physical properties of the cable. All they care about is whether or not the cable is able to successfully transmit data. It is assumed that cabling used will … Read more
An access port sends and receives untagged frames (i.e. all frames are in the same VLAN), while a trunk port supports tagged frames and thus allows to switch multiple VLANs.
Each port has a maximum speed of e.g. 1 GB/sb in one direction, so sending to two other machines will limit the overall send throughput to this value. It could receive the same amount from other machines because of the full-duplex transfer. Switches have a limit of how much traffic the backplane can handle. It … Read more
1 x 10Gb link for performance. Otherwise if a single server needs to use 1.1Gbs to another server it can’t because most load balancing systems use destination MAC or IP (Which would be the same). This also eliminates issues where links are busier then other links because of the same fact, if the hash works … Read more
Have a separate subnet (and preferably a separate VLAN) for your servers. This pretty much eliminates the issue of “accidental” overlap. Use some kind of NAC or port-level authentication and have a DHCP-assigned address be a prerequisite of the health check. Don’t let your users be admin on their local machines 🙂