ZyXEL Communications ES-2108 User Manual

ES-2108 Series User’s Guide

Chapter 1 Getting to Know Your Switch

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This chapter introduces the main features and applications of the switch.

The switch is a stand-alone layer-2 Ethernet switch with eight 10/100Mbps ports. The ES-
2108-G and ES-2108PWR also includes one Gigabit/mini-GBIC port. The ES-2108-LC 
provides one mini-GBIC slot and one 100 Base-FX fiber optic port for optical uplinking. 

With its built-in web configurator, managing and configuring the switch is easy. In addition, 
the switch can also be managed via Telnet, SSH (Secure SHell), any terminal emulator 
program on the console port, or third-party SNMP management.

This section describes the general software features of the switch.

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 client to obtain TCP/IP information (such as the IP address and subnet 
mask) from a DHCP server. If you disable the DHCP service, you must manually enter the 
TCP/IP information.  

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.

With DiffServ, the switch marks packets so that they receive specific per-hop treatment at 
DiffServ-compliant network devices along the route based on the application types and traffic 
flow.