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WTF is up with switches? (lazysoci.al)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Okay, I've been watching lots of YouTube videos about switches and I've just made myself more confused. Managed versus unmanaged seems to be having a GUI versus not having a GUI, but why would anyone want a GUI on a switch? Shouldn't your router do that? Also, a switch is like a tube station for local traffic, essentially an extension lead, so why do some have fans?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (7 children)

A managed switch allows you to have vlans, routing, QoS, spanning tree protection etc. You don't necessarily need a gui, a lot of them are cli only, which is preferable but less user friendly if you're not used to it. Depending on your needs a managed switch can be overkill.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (6 children)

But doesn't the router do the VLAN stuff? Sorry, I don't know how to phrase it properly

[–] Forne 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The router does the routing from one vlan into another. The switch has a funktion to apply the traffic with a specific vlan-tag. E.g. On the switch: to your PC vlan 3 could be applied and for your fridge vlan 25. On the router: You can allow vlan 3 access to the Internet but vlan 25 not. For management purposes you could allow vlan 3 access to vlan 25 but not the other way around.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So everything I thought was a LAN up until now is really just a VLAN?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You’ve run up against the first thing that seems to really confuse people when they begin learning about networking.

What you thought of as a LAN is a LAN. A VLAN is a Virtual LAN. It’s the same concept but virtualized, allowing more than one LAN on hardware that is just physically a single LAN.

When most people are talking about setting up VLANs they are usually describing the creation of a separate layer 3 subnet and the creation of a VLAN ID that gets tagged to all packets that get sent on that separate subnet. This allows for both layer 2 and 3 separation of the virtual lans on a single physical network.

Conceptually it’s very similar to VM’s running on a single server.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

So what differentiates a virtual LAN from a real LAN? Like how can I tell which one my ISP had set-up?

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