From the course: Networking Foundations: Networking Basics
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Switches
From the course: Networking Foundations: Networking Basics
Switches
- One of the most common network devices we have is an ethernet switch. And we talked earlier about how network interface cards and we said, we could put this into a device like a PC and we would plug in an ethernet cable into the network interface card, but what happens to the other end of this cable? Well at almost all cases we're going to plug that into an ethernet switch port. And we can think of an ethernet switch as the connective tissue that ties our network devices together. And these switches are intelligent. Now, what I mean by that is that they can intelligently forward network traffic. By the way, when we talk about a switch forwarding network traffic, we're commonly going to call that traffic frames. And what a switch does is learn what Mac addresses live off of which ports. Then when a frame comes into the switch destined for a specific Mac address, if the switch already learned the Mac address it will…
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