Okay, I’ve been watching lots of YouTube videos about switches and I’ve just made myself more confused. Managed versus unmanaged seems to be having a GUI versus not having a GUI, but why would anyone want a GUI on a switch? Shouldn’t your router do that? Also, a switch is like a tube station for local traffic, essentially an extension lead, so why do some have fans?
There is only one router on your network. It routes traffic from one machine to another. This is typically also the gateway, and it only has so many ports.
If you want more physical devices connected to your network, you’d need switches to fan out your network.
Un-managed switches essentially takes packets from one port and pass them through another port, easy peasy, nothing fancy.
Managed switches, however, can do more than just take packet from one port, then push it out to the other side. You can set up link aggregation for example, allowing more throughput by using two or more ports to go to the same destination (maybe for example a central file server). You can have L2 vs L3 switches so they route differently. You can have multiple paths to reach another machine, for redundancy but must implement STP to prevent broadcast loops etc.
Once your network grows larger than just Internet for a couple of desktops, it gets a lot more interesting.
Thank you. So based on this, shouldn’t things like OpenWRT and OPNSense be made for switches rather than routers? Since the switch seems to be doing all the heavy lifting.
If you use everything from the same vendor, you could manage them in one place (see Ubiquiti’s UniFi stack as example), but at the end of the day, they serve different purposes and target different parts of your network.
Switches are Layer-2 devices (data link layer). They operate on FRAMES and use MAC addresses to send data around between devices on the SAME NETWORK.
Routers are Layer-3 devices (network layer). They operate on PACKETS (which is basically a wrapper around FRAMES) and IP addresses to send traffic between DIFFERENT NETWORKS.
Switches may have some smart capabilities, such as creating separate logical networks (VLANs), or providing power to PoE devices, or prioritizing layer-2 traffic within a lan (CoS - class of service) and they do all the “heavy lifting” of slinging frames around to the right device on your LAN.
Routers tend to do all the “heavy lifting” of routing packets BETWEEN NETWORKS. They sit at the perimeter of networks (between your LAN and the internet, for example, or between your LAN and another DMZ LAN in your house, or maybe a GUEST LAN). They are often paired with firewall features to inspect the traffic and only allow certain types of traffic through one direction or the other, or they may simply route packets. They can also prioritize layer-3 traffic (QoS - quality of service).
A lot of things can get really confusing between the two because many routers have built-in switches, so they do some layer-2 stuff. And more expensive switches can even have some routing features to allow traffic to hop from one VLAN to another without going all the way out to a router (called layer-3 switches, though you typically don’t see these in homes outside the computer enthusiast community – they’re more of an enterprise thing).
I think the reason you don’t see OpenWRT or OPNSense for switches is because simple networks don’t need the advanced switching capabilities that such a product would provide, and highly complex networks often need the speed of hardware-based switching and don’t want to slow it down with a software layer.
I don’t know if anyone has told you this today, but you’re awesome! Thank you for writing that out.