SwitchBlox Rugged : Can the Rugged Switch Support Port Mirroring?

BotBlox Hardware
1

Product: SwitchBlox Rugged (10/100 Mbps Ethernet Switch, 5-Port, 4.45 cm Square Electronic Board)
SKU: BB-SWR-G-1

Market: DigiKey
Order Date: January 9, 2026

Hello,

I am currently using four of the five ports on the switch in unmanaged mode.

I would like to use the remaining port (Port 5) to monitor the network traffic on the other four ports (Ports 1–4).

Does the SwitchBlox Rugged support port mirroring?
If so, I would appreciate it if you could explain how to configure or use this feature.

Additionally, I observed an unusual behavior while using the SwitchBlox Rugged in unmanaged mode.

  • One master device and three slave devices are connected to Ports 1–4.
  • The master device transmits data to Slave #2 every 200 ms.
  • I powered off Slave #2 and left it disconnected for more than 10 minutes.
  • After that, the data packets that were intended for Slave #2 suddenly started appearing on both Slave #1 and Slave #3.
  • I confirmed this behavior using Wireshark.
  • When I powered Slave #2 back on, the packets immediately stopped being forwarded to the other ports.

Because this behavior looked similar to port mirroring, I wanted to ask whether it is expected behavior or if there is another possible explanation.

Thank you for your support.

Best regards,

Joowon

2

Hi Joowon, thank you for your question.

The SwitchBlox Rugged as an unmanaged switch does not directly support port mirroring. You can enable port mirroring by paring the SwitchBlox Rugged with a Rugged SOM that becomes a router. In the Rugged SOM UI you can enable port mirroring.

The behavior you’re seeing can be explained from default ethernet MAC-address-table aging and unknown-unicast flooding. When slave #2 is connected, the switch learns its MAC address and can properly route packets from the master device to the intended slave device. When disconnected, the switch remembers the slaves MAC address for some time and eventually forgets it. Therefore, the switch will flood other ports with the messages intended for slave #2 in effort to find the device. Once slave #2 is connected again, the switch finds the intended destination and no longer needs to flood ports.

Flooding and mirroring may exhibit the same behavior but have different intentions. Mirroring monitors traffic while flooding is a mode to discover the intended destination.

Thank you,

Nick