Router and Switch

Difference between router and switch

In those early days when router is router and switch is switch, these two are different in several ways:

 ·     Router understand IP head, and switch deal with MAC address

 ·     Router has its own IP address, and switch don’t

 ·     Router has an operating system running inside, and allow administrator to login into the system.

 ·     Network Administrator must configure routing table to make it works.

 ·     Switch is usually ready to use.

 ·     Router has routing software running inside, including route discovery protocol.
 ·     Routing software know how to deal with different IP packet, such as ICMP and other IP option functionality. Switches don’t.

 ·     Multiple routers can be connected together as a network.

 ·     You can’t directly multiple switches together to form a large network.

Mash up

Mashup comes from the term "Mashed Potato". Mashup combines services from different website into a single website. It provides service of combining different or the best of two online software into a single software. Mashups are most commonly a combination of maps and search locator services. One of the most popular mashup includes Google Transit.

NSFNET

NSFNET was a network for research computing deployed in the mid-1980s that in time also became the first backbone infrastructure for the commercial public Internet. Created as a result of a 1985 National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative, NSFNET established a high-speed connection among the five NSF supercomputer centers and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and provided external access for scientists, researchers, and engineers who were not located near the computing centers.

By the early 1990s, as commercial networks began to build their own backbone infrastructures and their own routing mechanisms, the public service furnished by NSFNET's backbone was turned over to the newer backbones and NSFNET was shut down. The scientific and research network continued as vBNS and, more recently, Internet2.