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Magnum P62-Series Hardened Switches Installation and User Guide (12/02)
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4.0 OPERATION
This section describes the function and operation of the Magnum P62-Series Switches.
4.1 Dual-Speed Functionality, and Switching
The Magnum P62-Series Hardened Switch provide six 10/100 RJ-45 switched
ports, and two 100Mb fiber ports. The architecture supports a dual speed switching environment,
with two built-in full-duplex “future-proof” fiber ports. The six RJ-45 copper ports equipped with
auto-negotiation capability.
The switched RJ-45 ports are full / half duplex and auto-sensing for speed. (See section
2.2). When the connected device is 10 Mbps, P62s obey all the rules of 10 Mbps Ethernet
configurations. The 10 Mbps users share a 10 Mbps traffic domain, and can “communicate with”
100Mbps users as well as 100Mbps domain. Similarly, the 100Mbps traffic obeys the rules of
100Mbps Ethernet, and can communicate with 10Mb domain too.
All Magnum P62 units are plug-and-play devices. There is no software configuration to
be done at installation or for maintenance. The Half / full duplex mode for the RJ-45 switched RJ-
45 ports is user dependent and changes (by auto-negotiation) to full or half duplex as the unit
attached with these ports. The internal functions of P62-Series Switch is described below.
Switching, Filtering and Forwarding
Each time a packet arrives on one of the switched ports, the decision is taken to either
filter or to forward the packet. Packets whose source and destination addresses on the same port
segment will be filtered, constraining them to one port and relieving the rest of the network from
processing them. A packet whose destination address is on another port segment will be
forwarded to the appropriate port, and will not be sent to the other ports where it is not needed.
Packets needed for maintaining the operation of the network (such as occasional multi-cast
packets) are forwarded to all ports.
The Magnum P62-Series Hardened Switch operate in the store-and-forward switching
mode, which eliminates bad packets and enables peak performance to be achieved when there is
heavy traffic on the network.
Switching, Address Learning
The Magnum P62-Series units have an address table capacity of 4K node addresses, and
are suitable for use in large networks. They are self-learning, so that as nodes are added or
removed or moved from one segment to another, the P62-Series automatically keeps up with node
locations.