ES-2108 Series User’s Guide

CHAPTER 1

Getting to Know Your Switch

This chapter introduces the main features and applications of the switch.

1.1 Introduction

The switch is a stand-alone layer-2 Ethernet switch with eight 10/100Mbps ports. The ES- 2108-G and ES-2108PWR also includes one Gigabit/mini-GBIC port. The ES-2108-LC provides one mini-GBIC slot and one 100 Base-FX fiber optic port for optical uplinking.

With its built-in web configurator, managing and configuring the switch is easy. In addition, the switch can also be managed via Telnet, SSH (Secure SHell), any terminal emulator program on the console port, or third-party SNMP management.

1.2 Software Features

This section describes the general software features of the switch.

DHCP Client

DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol RFC 2131 and RFC 2132) allows individual computers to obtain TCP/IP configuration at start-up from a server. You can configure the switch as a DHCP client to obtain TCP/IP information (such as the IP address and subnet mask) from a DHCP server. If you disable the DHCP service, you must manually enter the TCP/IP information.

VLAN

A VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) allows a physical network to be partitioned into multiple logical networks. Devices on a logical network belong to one group. A device can belong to more than one group. With VLAN, a device cannot directly talk to or hear from devices that are not in the same group(s); the traffic must first go through a router.

Differentiated Services (DiffServ)

With DiffServ, the switch marks packets so that they receive specific per-hop treatment at DiffServ-compliant network devices along the route based on the application types and traffic flow.

Chapter 1 Getting to Know Your Switch

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