Summary

In this chapter, I talked about the differences between switches and bridges and how they both work at layer 2 and create a MAC address forward/filter table in order to make decisions on whether to forward or flood a frame.

Most importantly in this chapter is the fundamental understanding of how a switch handles a frame. I covered in detail what the switch will do when a frame is received and the destination hardware address is not in the MAC address table, as well as when a broadcast or multicast frame is received: all are flooded out all ports except for the port that it was received on.

Finally, I covered detailed configuration of Cisco's Catalyst switches, including verifying the configuration and, most importantly, how to manage the switch from remote networks.