I have an old Linksys switch (EZXS55W) and it has worked fine for many years now, but I tried to hook something up today to the last open port and noticed the device didn't work when I did this. When I looked about my switch, it says that it disables that port when using the Uplink port.
I'm still a bit fuzzy on what the Uplink port does for me, I had always assumed that this Uplink port was for me to plug into from my router which is elsewhere in the house and hooked up to the modem so it could allow the switch to work for my other devices. I guess I need more than 5 ports now, but I see newer switches do not have this Uplink port generally anymore. Can I safely buy a new 8 port switch that does not have an Uplink port and maintain the exact same functionality?
If I understand what I'm reading correctly, newer switches did away with the need for a dedicated Uplink port so now the switches intelligently do whatever the Uplink did? I don't want to get further off from the accurate answer to this, so I just want to understand the technicality behind this so I'm not uninformed.
The one thing I guess I'm seeing from this though, if a switch is say an 8 port switch that means 1 port will be used to feed from the actual internet connection (whichever cable is providing it to the switch) and then the other 7 can be devices that need access to that shared network connection and by that virtue, the internet. It does not however, work like 5 port means it has 6 physical ports with one being the "internet" connection, and the other 5 being devices that need to be hooked up, correct? The latter is how I always thought it worked, but thinking this is incorrect now.
Best Answer
An uplink port is a port on which Transmit and Receive are reversed.
They are used to connect together 2 switches with a standard straight-trough cable. (otherwise it would require a cross cable where the transmit and receive are crossed in the cable rather than on the switch port)
Some switches came with 2 physical ports that were actually the same logical port , the first one being wired normally and the second wired "crossed". So you were able to use only one of the physical port a a time, depending if you connect a PC (or a router) or a switch.
Nowadays this generally doesn't matter anymore since most interfaces are "auto-mdix", meaning that the interface detect the type of device connected and cross transmit and receive internally if needed.
(and if the switch itself is not auto-mdix but the device you connect on it is , it also works).
Note: this apply mostly to 10Base-T / 100Base-TX ports, since Auto MDI-X is nearly ubiquitous on gigabit Ethernet, and doesn't apply to 10GB Ethernet and above where there's no more dedicated transmit / receive wires.