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From: leonard@arizona.edu
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Does the EtherSwitch eat preamble?
Message-ID: <1990Aug27.143144.62@arizona.edu>
Date: 27 Aug 90 21:31:44 GMT
Organization: University of Arizona
Lines: 18

No, multiport repeaters don't buffer packets.  

The question is, what exactly does this Kalpana EtherSwitch thingy do 
when the segment it wants to transmit onto has a collision in effect?

I think the answer is that it buffers.  I got some literature from 
Kalpana and it says that there is a 256-packet buffer per Ethernet
interface.

The next question is, does the EtherSwitch act like a repeater and
gobble preamble (so that you are limited to a max of 3 in series),
or does it act like a bridge and reconstitute the header, so that
the number you can have in series is limited only by propagation
delay?  The literature doesn't address this question.  (I would assume 
that it regenerates the header.)

Has anyone seen an EtherSwitch in action?  Is anyone from Kalpana
out there?