Port and links

A port or physical interface is a small thingy on your box you can connect a cable to. So far this software can only handle network ports. No power outlets yet. Each port can have a local name, that is how this port is visible from the OS point of view. For linux box that will be eth0, eth1, etc. Visible lable is what is written on the port on the box

Depending on the manufacturer you may observe labels as "1", "2", etc or something else. Port type is an essential property that allows port connections to be properly arranged. It lets you know that you won't be able to connect optical and copper ports together with one cable. Some ports have an L2 address. It's helpful to populate those, as you may find it handy to find ports by L2 addresses while investigating your STP tree. Now you can link or reserve ports.

Reserving a port is simply adding a comment to it, thus preventing it to be linked. A good reservation can be "Reserved for a field engineer laptop". Linking ports is creating a connection between them. That is plugging a cable to them. Only ports with compatible types can be linked. Say, RJ-45/100-Base TX can be linked to RJ-45/1000-Base TX, but can't be linked to LC/100-BASE FX. In many cases you'll need to add a bunch of ports from a switch. In this case there is a text area and a format selector. Just choose your device and format, paste the output to the textarea and click "Parse output" button. Also, you need to choose which port type is to be used, since it's not possible to guess that from the output.