Technology in disguise

[Ptex94]

I've heard a hub can be a switch in disguise. Can a wired router be something else in disguise? Are there any bad wired routers to avoid?

 

[office politics]

hubs and switches are different by physical architecture. a hub forwards all traffic to all ports of the hub. so a computer on port 1 sends data and that data is sent out ports 1, 2, 3, & 4. The machine with the destination ip, which is defined in the ip packet, is the only machine that will accept the data.

switches provide a direct path from each port to each port. Port 1 has a direct path to ports 2, 3, & 4 and port 2 has paths to 1, 3, & 4 and so on. This provides dedicated bandwidth for each port. Swithes also create separate collision domains. On a hub, packets can be transmitted at the same time and corrupt data. TCPIP detects this and waits a random interval for retry.

there's different types of switching technologies
cut through - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut_through
lol, and forget the others

routers forward traffic to different lan segments. routers also separate broadcast domains so broadcast traffic on lan segment A will not be forwarded across the router to lan segment B.

i stay away from dlink equiptment because i had a dlink gateway go bad on me. i have netgear now nad cisco is renowed for their networ equiptment.