Chapter 1
| Introduction
Description of Software Features
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Description of Software Features
The switch provides a wide range of advanced performance enhancing features.
Flow control eliminates the loss of packets due to bottlenecks caused by port
saturation. Storm suppression prevents broadcast, multicast, and unknown unicast
traffic storms from engulfing the network. Untagged (port-based), tagged, and
protocol-based VLANs, plus support for automatic GVRP VLAN registration provide
traffic security and efficient use of network bandwidth. CoS priority queueing
ensures the minimum delay for moving real-time multimedia data across the
network. While multicast filtering and routing provides support for real-time
network applications.
Some of the management features are briefly described below.
Configuration Backup
and Restore
You can save the current configuration settings to a file on the management station
(using the web interface) or an FTP/TFTP server (using the web or console
interface), and later download this file to restore the switch configuration settings.
Authentication This switch authenticates management access via the console port, Telnet, or a web
browser. User names and passwords can be configured locally or can be verified via
a remote authentication server (i.e., RADIUS or TACACS+). Port-based
authentication is also supported via the IEEE 802.1X protocol. This protocol uses
Extensible Authentication Protocol over LANs (EAPOL) to request user credentials
from the 802.1X client, and then uses the EAP between the switch and the
authentication server to verify the client’s right to access the network via an
authentication server (i.e., RADIUS or TACACS+ server).
Other authentication options include HTTPS for secure management access via the
web, SSH for secure management access over a Telnet-equivalent connection,
SNMP Version 3, IP address filtering for SNMP/Telnet/web management access.
MAC address filtering and IP source guard also provide authenticated port access.
While DHCP snooping is provided to prevent malicious attacks from insecure ports.
While PPPoE Intermediate Agent supports authentication of a client for a service
provider.
Access Control Lists ACLs provide packet filtering for IP frames (based on address, protocol, TCP/UDP
port number or TCP control code) or any frames (based on MAC address or Ethernet
type). ACLs can be used to improve performance by blocking unnecessary network
traffic or to implement security controls by restricting access to specific network
resources or protocols.
DHCP A DHCP server is provided to assign IP addresses to host devices. Since DHCP uses a
broadcast mechanism, a DHCP server and its client must physically reside on the
same subnet. Since it is not practical to have a DHCP server on every subnet, DHCP
Relay is also supported to allow dynamic configuration of local clients from a DHCP