RE: [Nolug] cox new orleans outage? - Cause and Explanation

On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Ron Johnson wrote:

> I remember "way back" that bridges and brouters were pretty
> common in the Ethernet world, but haven't heard about them in
> 5+ years, Since Switches Took Over The World.

A bridge was basically a 2-port switch... back when it was too expensive
to bridge/switch every port, you'd only bridge the segment uplink.
Everything behind the bridge was shared hubs. Functionally, a bridge and
a switch do the same thing.... a switch just typically has lots more
ports.

Likewise, a Layer 3 switch could be considered a router. And with VLANs
could be a brouter (bridge some protocols, route the others) on a per port
level. Some scoff at the OSI model, but it's very helpful when you want
to understand the difference between bridging, switching, routing, vlans,
and all that happens at Layers 1-4.

ray

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Ray DeJean  				       	 http://www.r-a-y.org
Systems Engineer                    Southeastern Louisiana University
IBM Certified Specialist  	      AIX Administration, AIX Support
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