Are you not using managed switches? It takes me about 1 second to find exactly which device and which port a device is connected to. Once you know that; you have a pretty nice collection of statistics and log messages that usually tell you exactly what is wrong.
Or am I missing something? On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 2:37 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: >> "Ethernet doesn't scale because of large amounts of broadcast traffic." >> >> We started to introduce multicast, and multicast-aware switches in >> IPv4; in IPv6 there is no broadcast traffic. We won't be able to >> scale networks up until we can turn off IPv4, > > In other words, probably not for another decade at least? > >> but once we can IPv6 >> will be able to grow much larger in terms of per-LAN. The best >> practice of no more than 512 per broadcast domain will seem very >> outdated at that point; especially when you add in multicast flood >> protection, the available bandwidth goes up, and performance of >> network interfaces improves. > > Yes and no. If you remove the broadcast traffic you can *in theory* > scale higher. However, this does nothing for the difficulty of L2 > troubleshooting, which is a real problem in large flat L2 networks. > >> The link you pointed to is talking about flat networks of tens of >> thousands of hosts; that might be excessive right now... But I can >> certainly see an IPv6-only LAN (with some filtering to make sure ARP >> and IPv4 traffic is dropped at the port) scaling easily to thousands >> of hosts with today's hardware. > > I'm afraid I remain sceptical, unless we come up with significantly > improved methods for L2 troubleshooting. > > Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, [email protected] > -- Ray Soucy Epic Communications Specialist Phone: +1 (207) 561-3526 Networkmaine, a Unit of the University of Maine System http://www.networkmaine.net/
