> TP-Link models with this "feature" hard-coded into the GUI would enable a VLAN on all physical ports with VLAN enabled.
That's a slightly strange feature. I guess it was to cope with downstream switches (or administrators(!)) that refused to assign an administrator-assigned VLAN tag to untagged traffic?
> I don't like the terms "dumb" or "smart" when discussing switches, because it isn't very useful.
In the lore that I'm familiar with, there are three general categories, "dumb", "smart", and "managed". The boundaries between the latter two categories are fuzzy... with "smart" switches tending to offer you very little configurability, and "managed" switches offering you nearly everything you'd expect from an Enterprise switch.
It's true that the difference between "dumb" and "not dumb" switches are that the former offers no end-user configuration, but how do you succinctly distinguish between a switch that offers -say- only the ability to force link speeds on specific ports, and a switch that offers link bonding and IGMP snooping and VLANs, and etc., etc., etc.? Use the terms "Prosumer" and "Enterprise"? [0]
But yeah, naming is hard... case in point:
> vs. non-configurable switches that may also be "smart", i.e., a "dumb" switch is really just a hub
Perhaps this was a brain fart on your part, because that's completely incorrect. An Ethernet hub does absolutely no filtering... all traffic that enters on one port is flooded to all other ports on the device. This means that Ethernet collision detection is essential for operation when attached to a hub, and total throughput decreases sharply when one has many chatty stations on one's LAN. The feature that distinguishes a switch from a hub is that a switch doesn't flood unicast traffic because it learns which ports have which MAC addresses behind them and routes traffic based on that information.
[0] Though, if I were king of the world, every consumer-grade switch would have the features of a low-to-mid-range managed switch. While I understand why things are the way they are, it's a crying shame that dumbswitches are the norm.
That's a slightly strange feature. I guess it was to cope with downstream switches (or administrators(!)) that refused to assign an administrator-assigned VLAN tag to untagged traffic?
> I don't like the terms "dumb" or "smart" when discussing switches, because it isn't very useful.
In the lore that I'm familiar with, there are three general categories, "dumb", "smart", and "managed". The boundaries between the latter two categories are fuzzy... with "smart" switches tending to offer you very little configurability, and "managed" switches offering you nearly everything you'd expect from an Enterprise switch.
It's true that the difference between "dumb" and "not dumb" switches are that the former offers no end-user configuration, but how do you succinctly distinguish between a switch that offers -say- only the ability to force link speeds on specific ports, and a switch that offers link bonding and IGMP snooping and VLANs, and etc., etc., etc.? Use the terms "Prosumer" and "Enterprise"? [0]
But yeah, naming is hard... case in point:
> vs. non-configurable switches that may also be "smart", i.e., a "dumb" switch is really just a hub
Perhaps this was a brain fart on your part, because that's completely incorrect. An Ethernet hub does absolutely no filtering... all traffic that enters on one port is flooded to all other ports on the device. This means that Ethernet collision detection is essential for operation when attached to a hub, and total throughput decreases sharply when one has many chatty stations on one's LAN. The feature that distinguishes a switch from a hub is that a switch doesn't flood unicast traffic because it learns which ports have which MAC addresses behind them and routes traffic based on that information.
[0] Though, if I were king of the world, every consumer-grade switch would have the features of a low-to-mid-range managed switch. While I understand why things are the way they are, it's a crying shame that dumbswitches are the norm.