On 6/28/20 3:00 PM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> Ethernet is the same ever since co-ax died, it's all point-to-point
> we just call the (rather specialised) computer with a lot of ports
> a switch.

There is room for debate.  Especially with how switches deal with
Broadcast / Unknown / Multicast frames.  ;-)

I used to say at an old job, when a computer farts at the waste water
treatment plant on the south west side of town, computers at the dump on
the north east side smelled it.  It was a giant L2 network.

> It runs in the switches these days but it is still there.

No, switches do something decidedly different than what UUCP / SLIP /
PPP / routing stacks do.

Switches effectively block or forward traffic based on a condition.
Where as UUCP / SLIP / PPP / routing stacks / et al. actually modify the
packets that flow through them.  Also, switches are non-terminal.  The
others are decidedly terminal from an L2 perspective.

> Indeed it does - but multi-drop interfaces are mostly out of fashion
> these days (apart from open air ones of course).

"Mostly" being the operative word.  There are still some multi-drop
installations used for special things.  I've also seen traditional point
to point circuits (fiber optic connections) tapped in a way that two
devices can actually be connected to the circuit as a form of active /
backup redundancy.



--
Grant. . . .
unix || die

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05