concept MAC address table in category system administration

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Learn Cisco Network Administration in a Month of Lunches. Login to get full access to this book.

Figure 2.6. How the MAC address table mitigates flooding

Flooding is an inevitable side effect of using MAC addresses. Fortunately, switches use a neat little trick to mitigate unnecessary flooding. Whenever a switch receives a frame, it looks at the source MAC address and the switch port it came in on. It uses this information to build a MAC address table.

17.3.4. Viewing the MAC address table

Once you have the MAC address of the target device, you’re ready to narrow its location to a specific port. To do that, you’ll query the MAC address table.