Cabletron Systems SmartSTACK ELS10-27TX Supplement Manual

Contents

6-1CHAPTER 6CONFIGURING WORKGROUPS USING SNMP6.1 OVERVIEWWorkgroups are a proprietary form that was developed prior to the IEEE standardbeing available. Workgroups are only supported in the 802.1D mode. TheELS10-27TX supports up to eight user-defined Workgroups, with limited supportfor overlapping Workgroups.The goal of Workgroups was to isolate broadcast and multicast traffic to withinthe Workgroup. In some cases unicast traffic will also be isolated. Due to the factthat a typical unicast address is obtained by first issuing an ARP packet (which isa broadcast, and the broadcast packet will not be forwarded outside of theWorkgroup), the unicast address will not be learned outside of the Workgroup.The end result is that host or servers will not be able to communicate with otherhosts or servers outside of their Workgroup.Unlike the IEEE standard VLANs which span switches, Workgroups only dealwith filtering and forwarding of packets within the single switch. When packetsare received on a port, the packet will be identified with a single Workgroup. Thepacket will then be forwarded or filtered based on that single Workgroupmarking. When a packet leaves the switch, the packet will appear just as it didwhen it was received on the inbound port.You can use a Cabletron Systems Network Management System, or a standardSNMP-based Network Management System (NMS), to manage theSmartSTACK Ethernet ELS10-27TX. This section describes Workgroupconfiguration using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).