CRACKING open A 24-PORT switch SO YOU DON’T have TO

[Kenneth Finnegan’s] publish about this 24-Port HP ProCurve 2824 Ethernet switch teardown was a delight to read. He’s taking an introduction to networking class at California Polytechnic state University. one of their labs included virtual machines shooting thousands of new MAC addresses at the thing all at once. in spite of it’s capability to switch data at a blazing fast rate, it’s capability to offer keeping that numerous new hardware identifiers was less than impressive. He wanted to discover out why as well as it just so happened he had one of these in his parts bin at house (which he refers to as if it’s a high-powered RPG character).

The mainboard is divided into three major blocks: the power supply, the switching hardware, as well as the processor that makes this a manged switch. Although he covers all of these pieces (and the switching stuff is extremely fascinating to discover about) it is the processor section that was causing the aforementioned slowdown. It’s a 266MHz PowerPC chip with a measly 64 MB of RAM. Of program this doesn’t requirement to be any type of much more powerful because all web traffic from previously ‘learned’ MAC addresses gets handled by the switching block as well as never touches the processor portion.

Don’t miss the end of his publish where he goes over exactly how the filtering caps, as well as semi-isolated ground planes assist to tame the beast produced from all of this high-speed switching.