cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
2355
Views
0
Helpful
4
Replies

choke switch

joseph.derrick
Level 1
Level 1

Hi,

What is a choke switch and what is its functions ?

Thanks,

Joseph

4 Replies 4

Danilo Dy
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

Hi,

I think "choke switch" is related to automotives.

It is a manual "switch" that will pull the choke lever inside the carburetor. You will see this in old motorcycles.

If you push the "choke switch" it closes the butterfly valve that blocks the "venturi" of a carburetor. By doing so, you change the mixture between air and fuel to more fuel - overdoing it will flood the motor with fuel and kills the engine.

There are electric version of "choke switch" nowadays.

Regards,

Dandy

thanks Dandy.

Dandy gave an interesting answer. But there is another way to use the term choke switch. In the book End To End QOS Network Design Tim Szigeti and Christina Hattingh use the term to describe a situation in which a switch limits (or chokes) the amount of traffic being sent to a device. Their example discusses a remote branch office with multiple users connected through a switch to the branch router. If the switch to router connection is Gig Ethernet then if something happens in the branch the switch will be able to send so much traffic to the router that it may become overwhelmed. But if the switch to router connection is 100 Mbps then the router is better protected since the traffic will be choked off at 100 Mbps.

HTH

Rick

HTH

Rick

I have come across this whilst working for a managed service company, and it was used to describe the narrowing effect in a network at a point of aggregation. 

 

I believe it's roots are within military terminology, referring to strategic points such as valleys or in particulary bridges where a very large force can effectively be met and held back by a far smaller force.  Therefore the usage of this kind of volcabulary may lend itself more towards security conversations.

 

Exploring the context of this further in terms of security, you can start to draw all sorts of comparisons with things such as the internet, being outside our administrative domain and a risk/ untrusted/ or "enemy" - and our secure gateway/ firewall complex/ external switch/ DMZ being employed as a narrowing point where we can provide a strong level of inspection and effectively ensure compliance by funnelling these flows into a 'narrower point of entry' and applying controls that suit our needs.  (e.g. firewall)

 

As others have mentioned, aggregation produces a bottleneck, which can be used to our advantage by applying security, or need management through traffic management.  So context may be important in interpreting the term.

 

Despite more modern SDN allowing a flattening of this from a flow point of view, whilst allowing our policy to maintain an order or hierachy in code via a controller - I'd personally still argue a case to be made for physical gateway based architectures for high risk connectivity between very major categories of network. This returns to your choke point - your choke switch allowing our perimeter firewalls to connect to the internet, to use this comparison plainly.  Very much about your appetitie for risk.

 

Despite the age of this post I felt compelled to comment, and I hope someone finds this different view interesting and useful.  It is such a shame when the message is lost through jargon.  I hope this is more appropriate to the original question.

Getting Started

Find answers to your questions by entering keywords or phrases in the Search bar above. New here? Use these resources to familiarize yourself with the community: