CHAPTER 6

CONFIGURING WORKGROUPS USING SNMP

6.1 OVERVIEW

Workgroups are a proprietary form that was developed prior to the IEEE standard being available. Workgroups are only supported in the 802.1D mode. The ELS10-27TX supports up to eight user-defined Workgroups, with limited support for overlapping Workgroups.

The goal of Workgroups was to isolate broadcast and multicast traffic to within the Workgroup. In some cases unicast traffic will also be isolated. Due to the fact that a typical unicast address is obtained by first issuing an ARP packet (which is a broadcast, and the broadcast packet will not be forwarded outside of the Workgroup), the unicast address will not be learned outside of the Workgroup. The end result is that host or servers will not be able to communicate with other hosts or servers outside of their Workgroup.

Unlike the IEEE standard VLANs which span switches, Workgroups only deal with filtering and forwarding of packets within the single switch. When packets are received on a port, the packet will be identified with a single Workgroup. The packet will then be forwarded or filtered based on that single Workgroup marking. When a packet leaves the switch, the packet will appear just as it did when it was received on the inbound port.

You can use a Cabletron Systems Network Management System, or a standard SNMP-based Network Management System (NMS), to manage the SmartSTACK Ethernet ELS10-27TX. This section describes Workgroup configuration using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

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Enterasys Networks ELS10-27TX manual Chapter Configuring Workgroups Using Snmp Overview