[Pc_Support] Re: ABS 8-Port, 5-Port GbE Switch -- VSC7388, VSC7385 (Blog article)

[Derek Konigsberg]

> What in the world do these $100/$200 items do?  I noted the 1000 uplink
> capability but why is that better than a good $10 switch?
> I am not attempting to be smart, I would truly like to know what they
> would provide for that much money.
> I bought some Cisco  units, 4 for $25 and I do not see any difference
> between them and an el-cheapo 8 port unit purchased a BigLots for less
> than $7.00.  In fact two of the Cisco units have crapped out during the
> past year or so.
> Homer Whittaker

They do a number of things that an el-cheapo switch can't do:
- Mount in a 19" equipment rack
- Have many more ports (24-ports in these)
- Have a management interface (serial or telnet)
- Support SNMP (you can query statistics and info from external software)
- Support VLANs and VLAN trunking (multiple logical ethernet networks)
- Provide the ability to configure any aspect of switch operation
- and I could go on and on

In other words, lots of features totally unnecessary if you're "plugging 5 
PCs together", but lots of interesting and useful stuff if you're 
building/managing a larger network (or are just a network geek that likes 
to tinker with such things on a smaller scale)

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Derek Konigsberg
octo at logicprobe.org
http://hecgeek.blogspot.com
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