Managed switches

[Dizzie]

Is it worth paying the extra for a managed switch for a 50 max LAN party?
4 x 16ports?

[wishy]

24 port switches are better mate, less trouble with uplink.

From a game point of view, managed aren't worth it, but as soon as file transfere comes in, you want managed ones with a decent backbone if at all possible

[Dizzie]

if there's no or very little file transfer then a normal 10/100 switch will be ok then?

[WhiteKnight]

yes, even if there is, for a small network, you dont need a core switch with an insane backbone to it.. altho it is nice :P

[MONK]

Management is useful when things get big and along with that the price gets big.

[bvark]

IMO yes - you will get a very large number of LAN parties out of your switch (excepting power problems), so if you can afford it, another 50 quid isn't that bad.

(My 100Mbit hub has done about 70 lan parties now :)

[Dizzie]

I think my 100mbit hub has done about 30 LAN's :D Getting old now though :(

[KermitTheFrag]

as for netgear, my 4-port 10baseT hub has done ZERO lans and is dying (power problems i think). I think ive got the fated "duff power supply disease" that affects that range :(

[Dizzie]

My little 8port 10base hub has provided me and my step-brothers with hours of gaming & networking and is still going strong. Helps to keep the rest of the family happy by suppling net access around the house :D

[Leviathan]

question, say i got 3 switchs i gotta put cables from there uplink ports to a core switch cuz i cant put cables from 1 2another cuz they only got 1 uplink port rite?? and where can a get a core switch, scan dont do em...?

[bvark]

Any four-port switch would do as a 'core' switch if you only have four switches to connect to it.

Of course, that means each of the desktop switches only has 100Mbit to each other switch.

If you're serious about buying one for core use, you'll want to pick switches that support link bundling to have 200-400Mbits per desktop switch.

You won't find anyone talking about a 'core' switch at this end of the market - core switches take up racks :)

[Dizzie]

Go from the uplink on 1 switch to a normal port on another.

[Leviathan]

ah i c but how that work cuz i thort a normal port of a switch will only let 1 client on it, and uplink theres no limit. does this mean u can dasiy chain switchs ? it is still better to use a core switch when having more than 3 switchs ? bvark i didnt c n e 200-400Mbits switchs, just 10, 100 and Gbit, on scan that is.

[robfult]

Normal ports on switches are usually the same as the uplink port, the main difference being that the wires are crossed, the two wires that are used to transmit data are crossed with the two for recieving data thus you get a crossover cable without having to go to the effort of making one. The actual client limit is based on teh amount of internal memory the switch has for storing the details of which MAC address is on which port, my cheapy £40 8 port 10/100 switches can support a maximum of 4096 MAC address on the network segment so I doubt you will run into issues. There is no reason why you cannot daisy chain switches though you have to remeber that to go from one end to the other will use the bandwidth of each of the uplink connections.

To be able to get the 200-400Mbit interswitch bandwidth, you use 2 ports and 2 cables to connect the switch, this requires that the switches at each end support the protocol and usually implies managed switches, for 50 people I doubt the games traffic would actually reach such levels and the overall cost of switches to support this is probably not worth the extra cost to you. For other traffic such as ftp and http it maybe worth putting limits on the speed that data can leave the connection, very easy in the Linux kernel and probably most other versions of unix though not too sure about windows!

[bvark]

The games traffic for 40 people will have trouble reaching 10Mbit, let alone 100 or 400 ;-)

It's very easy to configure your box to slow down data transfer, it's the people out on the network it's hard to slow down - since they're not cooperating with your 'no file transferzzz across the network', they're unlikely to want to set bandwidth limits.

[Leviathan]

robfult, 2 cables, so a switch with 2 uplink ports? u could do it between 2 swicths, uplink to port and other switchs uplink to port. manged means u can set stuff rite ? plz explane thx

[robfult]

Each switch stores the MAC addresses it can access along which ports, when you have one machine plugged into that port, it knows that traffic destined for that address should be switched down that port. When you connect 2 switches, the MAC addresses stored for the connecting port is the MAC addresses of every machine on the other switch. Therefore if you just connect two links, they will probably get horribly confused.

More intelligent switches i.e. managed switches have a way around this, you specify the two ports as a trunk or a link bundle or whatever that manufacturer calls it, then when it send traffic it knows that both links will do the same job and dosen't treat them as 2 seperate links. The alternative is the way the MPUK switches do it where 12 of the 24 ports use one link as their uplink and another 12 use another link, this balances the traffic out across the 2 and appears to the other switches as 2 12 port switches I guess.

[Leviathan]

nice, can they set that up because they r managed switches ? how do managed switches work n e way, whats the diff n stuff? thx

[robfult]

Not so sure how they actually work, I guess they have an inbuilt processor that allows them to look at the packets on each port and do clever things with them. Managed usually implies that you can connect to them and configure them in some way. Obviously to create trunks you would need to so hence the need for managed. What a managed switch actually provides to the end user is all down to the manufacturer, their is really no standard.

[MrOnion]

/me askes same question as Leviathan

ne 1 got a link to an explination of the differences?

thnx in advance
onion

[WhiteKnight]

Simple explanations:

Hub
All traffic is fed to every port on the hub. If you have two hubs connected via an uplink port then any traffic gets fed to every port on both hubs. This is the same for every hub you connect.
This is very wasteful of bandwidth, and i wouldnt recomend more than 16 ports to be used in a single collision domain (i.e. dont connect more than 12 together)

You can have more, however, if you put a switch in the middle and have 16 ports on either side of the switch.

Switch - Simple (OSI Layer 2)
A basic home switch (like the ones you get from scan for £40 are like this. The have minimal intelegence in them. They store the MAC address of any device that connects to them. If you send data into a switch, only broadcast data is transmitted to every machine. Peer to peer traffic gets routed directly from machine to machine. If you link up another switch via an uplink port, you switch will forward any traffic with a destination it doesnt know about, down the "uplink" port to be dealt with by the switch at the other end.
If you plug in multiple uplinks, many simple switches get confused and dont know what to do.

Switch - Managed (OSI Layer 2)
A managed switch is like the ones on each row at an I-series event. Retailing for around £400 to £500, these switches have a greater degree of inteligence than the simple ones. You can normally control most aspects of the switch such as: Enabling / disabling ports, setting port speeds, setting duplex, setting trunking, setting v-lans.

Trunking is where you tell the switch to use 2 or more ports to connect to another switch. The switch then inteligently load balances the traffic destined for the other switch. This can only be used if both switches support the same trunking protocol. This is normally only the case with "same brand" devices.

V-Lans are where you basically cut the switch into smaller switches. You can make it so, for example, ports 1-12 cant talk to ports 13-24. In our case we did this so we could send 2 uplinks from the "PlaNET" switches on the desks, to the "Extreme" switches in the server room.

Switches - Managed (OSI Layer 3)
A good example of a layer 3 switch is the Extremes that are the core of the I-Series network. They have an extensive level of managability. They also route data based on IP address as well as MAC address. This gives you the opportunity to interigate the traffic, and make descisions on whether you want it or not.
i.e. Denying all traffic on port 21 to stop ftp traffic.

These L3 switches tend to be significantly more expensive. The Extremes weighing in at around £7000 each i believe.



Hope that has been of some assistance.

[Leviathan]

thanks very much

[WhiteKnight]

no probs..

[Dizzie]

are the switches from scan any good for a 50 player LAN? I was thinking of buying a couple of the 16 port ones. thanks

[WhiteKnight]

for a 50 player lan. get a decent managed brand name switch for the central switch (3-com, cisco, nortel, or somthing) for servers and and then hang the "scan specials" for the "users" off of that.

[Goldsacs]

I am about to purchase switches, 3 x 16port 10/100 scan specials.
For my LAN for 50 people plus servers. I don't think that a managed switch is required just yet.

I will use one as core switch. with two uplinked to it. For that many people, if someone does start some file transfer that raises the pings then the party is small enough for my to slap them about :D

There is a low tech way to slow down file transfer from my ftp server. i.e. use my old 10M network card :D

If transfer becomes a problem accross the network (which for fifty peeps I doubt will happen for long periods of time), due to client to client transfers then I just try and arrange seating in a cunning mannor.