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?

  • Churchill@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    a switch is like a tube station for local traffic, essentially an extension lead

    You’re right, a basic unmanaged switch is basically that!

    Managed switch is a smarter switch. For example, creating VLANs or doing port trunking.

    These are generally configured on the switch GUI as you mentioned.

    Think of them as a computer with dedicated software to control how the network interfaces behaves.

  • take6056@feddit.nl
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    2 months ago

    Certainly not an expert here but the GUI “being there” means you can configure something about the traffic flowing through, maybe VLANs or QoS. That also might be why some switches have fans. Deciding what packet has priority or is allowed is a bit more computationally complex (read: heat generating) than just pushing a packet to the right address.

    You might want a VLAN if you have a server connected to the same switch as your PC, but they shouldn’t “see” each other. If you didn’t have a VLAN there, your router or firewall can’t manage anything about the connection. Say you have a website and database on your server and only the website should be accessible by your computer, you’d be able to configure that with the firewall.

  • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net
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    7 months ago

    There is only one router on your network. It routes traffic from one machine to another. This is typically also the gateway, and it only has so many ports.

    If you want more physical devices connected to your network, you’d need switches to fan out your network.

    Un-managed switches essentially takes packets from one port and pass them through another port, easy peasy, nothing fancy.

    Managed switches, however, can do more than just take packet from one port, then push it out to the other side. You can set up link aggregation for example, allowing more throughput by using two or more ports to go to the same destination (maybe for example a central file server). You can have L2 vs L3 switches so they route differently. You can have multiple paths to reach another machine, for redundancy but must implement STP to prevent broadcast loops etc.

    Once your network grows larger than just Internet for a couple of desktops, it gets a lot more interesting.

  • BestBouclettes@jlai.lu
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    7 months ago

    A managed switch allows you to have vlans, routing, QoS, spanning tree protection etc. You don’t necessarily need a gui, a lot of them are cli only, which is preferable but less user friendly if you’re not used to it. Depending on your needs a managed switch can be overkill.

    • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.alOP
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      7 months ago

      But doesn’t the router do the VLAN stuff? Sorry, I don’t know how to phrase it properly

      • rtxn@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        VLANs are an extension of the Ethernet technology, and operate on the link layer (OSI layer 2). They are handled by switches. VLANs can belong to different subnets, and communication between them requires routing, which happens on the network layer (OSI layer 3) on either routers or layer-3 switches, but VLANs themselves are handled by switches.

        I recommend Network Chuck on youtube, his videos are very noob-friendly.