Re: Re (2): Linux hub

[Celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:04:42 -0500
Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:

> Celejar put forth on 9/6/2010 8:42 PM:
> 
> > I'm curious; especially for the cheap switches, why would they need to
> > store so many MAC addresses?  What's the use case for a cheap switch
> > actually seeing thousands of MACs since 'boot'?
> 
> Scenario:  I work for a huge company that has 7,000 employees in a
> single campus, with more than that many PCs, Servers, printers, etc,
> each having a MAC address.  I'm doing layer 2 switching campus wide, and
> only routing at the network edge to/from the internet/wan provider.
> 
> I'm in a tech lab, and I need to jack in a small switch for testing
> servers.  People all over the campus are going to need to hit the test
> servers.  Thus, this little 8 port switch in my lab needs to be able to
> store more than 7,000 mac addresses.
> 
> Maybe not the best scenario, but it's a valid one.

I suppose, but since the vast majority of applications of cheap
switches don't require this capability, wouldn't it be cheaper to leave
it out, and only include it as an extra feature for those who need it?

I don't actually know what it costs them to include the RAM for the MAC
table, though; perhaps it's negligible, so they just always throw it in.

Celejar
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