I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2025

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  • An unmanaged switch is just a single plane where all ports are equal. All ports share OSI layers 1 and 2.

    Managed switches (also sometimes known as “smart” switches) provide additional features on top of that. The most useful is VLANs (virtual LANs) which let you segregate traffic. Two ports on different VLANs share the same physical layer (layer 1) but are separated at the data link layer (layer 2).

    Additionally, managed switches let you do things like disable/enable ports (for security, power savings, etc), enable port mirroring, and combine multiple ports into an aggregation group (e.g. bond four 1 Gb links into one 4 Gb link).