Ethernet -- thicknet and thinnet before 10BaseT

From: Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
Date: Sun Jul 29 04:22:54 2001

On Jul 28, 8:16, Bill Pechter wrote:

> But bridges originally just repeat...
> -- maybe they do the old 1987 spanning tree loop avoidance...
> -- maybe they learn and eventually send just the traffic for the remote
end
>
> But in the beginning they were dumb repeaters.
> And the network was a dumb wire... Coax. How dumb can it get.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying. If you're saying that the earliest
bridges were dumb repeaters, you're wrong. The definition of a bridge is a
layer 2 device that passes traffic according to the destination addresses
contained in the packets. If you're saying that the way a bridge works is
to learn where addresses are, and until it knows, it will pass packets
everywhere, that's true.

Even with old bridges, you wouldn't be able to see *all* the network
traffic because the bridges would split the net into different collision
domains (that's what they are for), so the only traffic that would go
everywhere was broadcast traffic. You wouldn't even see all the broadcast
traffic if you had a router or two in the system, and there's nothing new
about that either.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York
Received on Sun Jul 29 2001 - 04:22:54 BST

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