Olicom CrossFire 8730, Reference Manual

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CrossFire 8730 Switch Reference Guide, DOC-7047 v. 1.1 Switch Overview
Filtering
Filtering is important for a LAN switch. Filters can be used to reduce broadcast
traffic, block certain protocols and provide security functions.
The switch provides filters for:
•
Destination or source MAC addresses
•
Destination service access point (DSAP)
•
Subnetwork Access Protocol (SNAP) type
Each protocol filter can be applied on a per-port basis for both input and output
traffic. This feature allows certain protocols to be blocked from certain ports. For
example, filters can be established to allow only Systems Network Architecture
(SNA) traffic to flow to ports with SNA gateways.
Source and destination MAC address filtering can be applied to all incoming
frames. The MAC address filters act in one of three ways:
•
Block destination address at a specific port—this prevents the specified port
from sending frames to a specified destination.
•
Allow destination address at specific ports—this indicates that the specified
port must send frames to the specified destinations only.
•
Force destination address to a specific port—this allows forwarding to a
unicast address that has not been learned. It can also be used to limit the
forwarding of Multicast addresses to a subset of ports. This last filter applies
to non-source-routing frames only.
Congestion Control
At regular intervals, the switch CPU inspects the queues on all Token-Ring output
ports. If a queue size is above a certain threshold, the port is instructed to:
•
Set the transmit priority for low priority frames to a specified high level
•
Delete old frames from the queue until it reaches a specified size
When the queue size again comes below a normal threshold size the port is
instructed to set the transmit priority back to the normal level.