And another two weeks have passed *sigh*. So many things to post, yet I barely ever get to actually posting it… Anyway, right now I have material to post about one thing and it’s even the most recent thing… Why not post the older stuff first? The answer to that question is simple, I don’t have all the material I need for the other things.
So today’s topic is a switch. A pretty big one too. A Nortel Networks Baystack 310-24T. Nortel Networks isn’t very well known in this part of the world which is probably also the reason why I had never heard of it before I visited my girlfriend over at her parent’s house for the first time. Her brother has quite a few Nortel switches and two of them were simply in the way and he no longer wanted to use them because they were too old. Both of these switches were Baystack 310-24T models and he simply gave them away together with his dad and I was the lucky one to receive both of them.
The Baystack 310-24T switch:
The Baystack 310-24T switch has 24 10base-T RJ45 ethernet ports. This means that it has a maximum transfer speed of 10 megabits per second on each port at half duplex. Half duplex means that it can only send or receive at a port at one given time. It is not possible to send and receive on one port at the same time. Besides that it has one 100Base-TX uplink port which means that it has one port with a maximum transfer speed of 100 megabits per second at full duplex. So it can send and receive at the same time. And uplink means that it’s supposed to be used to connect it to another switch. The pins in an uplink port are arranger differently, crossed over so you can use a standard straight through UTP cable to connect it to another switch, in most cases the other switch would be a faster backbone switch to which it will be connected to one of it’s normal network ports.
Whenever I get the time I’m going to figure out all of it’s specifications and dedicate a page to it and maybe I’m going to try to get some more Nortel Networks equipment as well, because there is always more than just Cisco Systems.
