Re: future of IDS

[Darren Reed <darrenr () reed wattle id au>]

In some email I received from Doug Hughes, sie wrote:
> Darren Reed writes:
> > Something which just occurred to me, switches are `meant' to be able to
> > switch such that full speed communications are kept between any two nodes
> > on the switch without taking bandwidth away from other pairs.
> >
> > If you have a switch with 24 ports for 100BaseT, can you then push 1.2Gb/s
> > through it ?  Or is that just the `gigabit' hubs ?  The problem is, that
> > if you have a single 100BaseT monitor port, either than throughput for the
> > entire switch is 100BaseT (serious reduction in performance) or you lose
> > packets on the monitor port.
> That's what the gigabit uplink ports are for. There may be vendors that
> let you funnel all your 100Mbit and dup it out a gig, but I'm not aware
> of them. But yes, the switch backplane better be capable of approaching
> 1.2Gb, and most of them are these days.

I have just one problem with this: how do I plug my PC into one of those
gigabit uplink ports ?

Also, I imagine that the protocol on those connectors is proprietry, so
even if you could connect it, making sense of it would be the next trick.

Darren