Switches: The Rest of the Story

Switches: The Rest of the Story

In the previous section, the switch had a MAC address table, and it made its decisions about where to forward the frames based on that table. However, you don't yet know how the table got into the switch, or whether the information is accurate. Also, what happens when the switch gets a frame, and the destination MAC address isn't in the MAC address table? Simply put, you haven't seen all the details yet, so in this next section, I'll fill in the holes in the story. First, you'll read about how a switch learns the entries to put in the MAC address table. You'll also read about what a switch does when it doesn't yet have an entry for a particular MAC address.