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WTF is up with switches? (lazysoci.al)

submitted 6 months ago by sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to c/homenetworking@selfhosted.forum

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Okay, I've been watching lots of YouTube videos about switches and I've just made myself more confused. Managed versus unmanaged seems to be having a GUI versus not having a GUI, but why would anyone want a GUI on a switch? Shouldn't your router do that? Also, a switch is like a tube station for local traffic, essentially an extension lead, so why do some have fans?

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[–] borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You’ve run up against the first thing that seems to really confuse people when they begin learning about networking.

What you thought of as a LAN is a LAN. A VLAN is a Virtual LAN. It’s the same concept but virtualized, allowing more than one LAN on hardware that is just physically a single LAN.

When most people are talking about setting up VLANs they are usually describing the creation of a separate layer 3 subnet and the creation of a VLAN ID that gets tagged to all packets that get sent on that separate subnet. This allows for both layer 2 and 3 separation of the virtual lans on a single physical network.

Conceptually it’s very similar to VM’s running on a single server.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 1 points 6 months ago

So what differentiates a virtual LAN from a real LAN? Like how can I tell which one my ISP had set-up?