A Core Competence Product Evaluation

Switch Management

It's interesting to note that you don't have to manage the Port Switching Hub to use it. It will work as a single shared Ethernet segment hub, with all ports by default assigned to internal LAN segment 1.

You can manage the hub using either a command line interface or 3Com's Transcend Quick Configuration Manager. You can use either management tool by connecting the hub and PC via the console port (using a serial connection or via a modem). To get a feel for the command line interface, we used a VT100 terminal emulation to configure an IP address and mask for the PS Hub 40 using the commands Ipaddress nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn and SUbnetmask mmm.mmm.mmm.mmm. We then reset the unit. You can also perform the IP networking configuration directly using the Quick Configuration manager, but we wanted to perform most of our configuration over the Ethernet.

[The Transcend Quick Configuration Manager provides a number of features. We omit a detailed discussion but wish to observe that the software offers online context-sensitive help and can be used to reset and initialize a hub, or to upgrade hub software.]

The Quick Configuration Manager expects to access the hub over a serial interface; if you do configure IP addressing information using terminal emulation, you must

select Device Access from the File menu (the other choice here is Reset View, neither of which are intuitive under a pulldown called FILE),

select Network to provide the IP address of the Hub, and wait briefly while the manager connects to the hub.

The simpler course is to choose to set up IP using a Quick Configuration Manager local window. From the Configure pulldown, select IP Setup, then click on the Easy Setup button in the ensuing window. IP Setup presents a series of sub-windows that ask for values of each parameter in the IP setup window using a sequence of sub-windows in a straightforward manner. Once you've answered all the questions, the resulting configuration is displayed, as illustrated below:

Once connected a bitmap of the hub or hub stack is illustrated. Stacks of PS Hub 40's show all hub devices in a single window (not illustrated, as we only had one to play with...). The bitmap can be refreshed periodically: the refresh frequency is configurable through the Community/Polling window, accessed via the Configure Pulldown.

The bitmap of the PS Hub 40 shows the current state of each port. Green (administratively enabled), red (enabled but no signal present), and blue (administratively disabled) are used to identify the port state.

next...

Want to know more about VLAN's