Port Mirroring; Port Trunking - Allied Telesis AT-8024 Installation Manual

Port Mirroring

Port Trunking

The port mirroring feature allows you to unobtrusively monitor the
traffic being received and transmitted on a port on a switch by having
the traffic copied to another switch port. You can connect a network
analyzer to the port functioning as the mirror port to monitor the traffic
without impacting network performance or speed.
Port trunking is an economical way for you to increase the bandwidth
between an AT-8024 or AT-8024GB Fast Ethernet Switch and another
network device, such as a server, router, workstation, or another switch.
A port trunk is two or more data ports that have been grouped together
to increase the bandwidth between a switch and a network node by
functioning as one logical path. This increase in bandwidth can prove
useful in situations where a single connection between the switch and a
node is insufficient to handle the traffic load.
Port trunks are also useful in adding redundancy to the critical devices of
your network. If one link of a port trunk fails, the remaining links will
continue to function.
Despite the software configuration and physical connections, there are
no data loops in a port trunk because of load balancing. The port trunk
always sends packets from a particular source to a particular destination
over the same link within the trunk. A single link is designated for
flooding broadcasts and packets of unknown destination.
Below are the guidelines to follow when planning a port trunk:
The switch can support one port trunk at a time.
G
A port trunk can consist of 2, 4, or 8 twisted pair ports.
G
The duplex mode, speed, and flow control settings must be the
G
same for all of the ports in a trunk.
The ports of a port trunk must be members of the same VLAN. A
G
port trunk cannot consist of ports that are members of different
VLANs.
When cabling a trunk, the order of the connections should be
G
maintained on both nodes. The lowest numbered port in a trunk
on the switch should be connected to the lowest numbered port
of the trunk on the other device, the next lowest numbered port
on the switch should be connected to the next lowest numbered
port on the other device, and so on.
AT-8024 and AT-8024GB Installation Guide
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