2.5gb switch question

[MorbidNature]

Does a network switch function as its own network?

It might be a dumb question but i want to make sure I'm not being a dummy

 

I'll explain what i mean...

I'm a photographer and from time to time i go out for photo shoots - shooting tethered to my laptop (meaning that the picture are saved directly to the laptop), anyway when i get home i need to offload all the files, now instead transferring everything to another drive then to main PC and then to my NAS,  I'd love to be able to just hook up my laptop with an Ethernet 2.5gb adapter and just dump everything onto my nas and work on the file via network on my main PC.

 

the thing is my office is on the 2nd floor the main router/modem is downstairs (its kinda shitty but its one provided by the ISP and but want to f*ck with it)

Now my internet speed isn't all that great so that's not really an issue, i just want to make sure that if i hook up a switch on the second floor it will work as its own network and ill be able to transfer files at 2.5gb between all the different PCs on the 2nd floor and get what ever bandwidth it can get from the bottom floor

[SupaKomputa]

Yes and no.

No, it will need a router to assign IP for each devices. After you got the ip, the traffic will go directly through the switch, so you dont need a 2.5 router for this to work.

Yes, if you assign a static IP for each device. like 192.168.0.1 for pc and 0.2 for the NAS.

[MorbidNature]

4 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Yes and no.

No, it will need a router to assign IP for each devices. After you got the ip, the traffic will go directly through the switch, so you dont need a 2.5 router for this to work.

Yes, if you assign a static IP for each device. like 192.168.0.1 for pc and 0.2 for the NAS.

And im assuming a router just does that automatically

[LAwLz]

2 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Yes and no.

No, it will need a router to assign IP for each devices. After you got the ip, the traffic will go directly through the switch, so you dont need a 2.5 router for this to work.

Yes, if you assign a static IP for each device. like 192.168.0.1 for pc and 0.2 for the NAS.

Fun fact, you can be assigned an IP address even without a DHCP. It's called APIPA or "automatic private IP addressing". That's why you often see the IP 169.254.0.X when you got issues connecting to a DHCP.

But in general you want a DHCP and shouldn't rely on APIPA to work.

[SupaKomputa]

Just now, MorbidNature said:

And im assuming a router just does that automatically

yeah, the router will do that automatically if you enable DHCP server and DHCP client on the devices.

when plugged in the lan, the OS will search for any DHCP server (the router), and it will automatically ask for an ip address.

Any router will do even the old 100mbp.

Switch doesnt have this feature. If you want to skip the router you can:

1. Assign manually ip for each devices.

2. Enable DHCP service on one of the device, either the PC or the NAS (some NAS have this function).

[MorbidNature]

23 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

yeah, the router will do that automatically if you enable DHCP server and DHCP client on the devices.

when plugged in the lan, the OS will search for any DHCP server (the router), and it will automatically ask for an ip address.

Any router will do even the old 100mbp.

Switch doesnt have this feature. If you want to skip the router you can:

1. Assign manually ip for each devices.

2. Enable DHCP service on one of the device, either the PC or the NAS (some NAS have this function).

Would i need to do the same for the laptop since offloading is also part of the process, and would i have to do it every time?

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 12/13/2021 at 4:06 PM, MorbidNature said:

Would i need to do the same for the laptop since offloading is also part of the process, and would i have to do it every time?

Not sure what you mean, but the basic thing is that if the router is plugged into the switch - you don't need to change anything.

The switch is part of the same network as the router (which likely also has a switch in it).  What controls the speed is is how much bandwidth there is on the network between the two clients.  So if they are both plugged into the 2.5Gbit switch then they can talk to each other at 2.5Gbit.  The traffic will never touch the router, other than DHCP to assign the IP addresses.

 

What confuses a lot of people is when they think network they think TCP/IP or Internet, but the network is the lower level that simply sends data packets from one place to another.  At a basic level, a switch merely looks at the MAC addresses of the source and destination, passing the traffic onto the relevant switch ports.