ZyXEL Communications GS-4012F, User Manual

Page: 32 / 306

GS-4012F User’s Guide
Chapter 1 Getting to Know Your Switch 31
C
H A P T E R
1
Getting to Know Your Switch
This chapter introduces the main features and applications of the switch.
1.1 Introduction
The GS-4012F is a stand-alone layer-3 Gigabit Ethernet switch with 12 min-GBIC slots and
four Gigabit/mini-GBIC ports. By integrating router functions, the GS-4012F performs wire-
speed layer-3 routing in addition to layer-2 switching.
With its built-in web configurator, managing and configuring the switch is easy. In addition,
the switch can also be managed via Telnet, any terminal emulator program on the console port,
or third-party SNMP management.
1.2 Software Features
This section describes the general software features of the switch.
IP Routing Domain
An IP interface (also known as an IP routing domain) is not bound to a physical port.
Configure an IP routing domain to allow the switch to route traffic between different
networks.
DHCP
DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol RFC 2131 and RFC 2132) allows individual
computers to obtain TCP/IP configuration at start-up from a server. You can configure the
switch as a DHCP server or disable it. When configured as a server, the switch provides the
TCP/IP configuration for the clients. If you disable the DHCP service, you must have another
DHCP server on your LAN, or else the computer must be manually configured.
VLAN
A VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) allows a physical network to be partitioned into
multiple logical networks. Devices on a logical network belong to one group. A device can
belong to more than one group. With VLAN, a device cannot directly talk to or hear from
devices that are not in the same group(s); the traffic must first go through a router.