recommendations for switches

Pants

Pants

Active Member
Reaction score
21
Location
California, United States
Need a couple of switches for my home test lab.

What switches would you recommend for my practicing, that I would likely find in small businesses?
 
Last edited:
If you are referring to small business as in 10 seats or less (roughly speaking) the reality is most of them are using unmanaged switches. They don't need a L2 or L3 switch since they usually have very simple network setups and their router does what they need.
 
Just realizing I might not need to buy something like this for my lab. A soho router's built-in switch is tied to a pre-configured LAN interface internally so that's pretty much a built-in switch which would be a lot cheaper. DDwrt can make that built-in switch "smart" enough for what I want to learn in the next few months. I think. I will keep my eye on the HP though. I'm going to score one of those E3000s that stonecat recommended a little while back, and put DDwrt on it.
 
You'll get basic stuff there in DD....I forget if it did tagged VLANs....I know it does basic port based VLANs..but those are kidnergarden stuff. You want to learn proper VLANs...tagged 'n untagged stuff.

Look for a Procurve on fleabay.

Life time warranty. (most models...not on some of the entry level baby switches).
You put them in...configure them, done..they run for years and years and years. Only have to touch them to move them, or replace them during an upgrade way down the road.

Unlike cheaper switches...sometimes network acts funny, gotta reboot a switch to fix it. Don't have to go rebooting Procurve switches. You can pound the living snot out of them with heavy traffic and they keep going.
 
I think DDwrt DOES do tagging on my model, but I'll see if I can find a couple of those like you said. Never been to "flea" bay before. Lol

They look pricy on eBay
 
Last edited:
I think YSC's point is that DDWRT, as well as things like Tomato, have limited functionality when compared to industrial strength solutions like HP Procurve or Cisco managed switches.

If you want to train on something that you can sell then you should just pickup a Procurve. The interface will be the same on production. And I would pick them over the other low cost managed switch options like Netgear.

If you are just looking at getting a handle on what goes on with VLAN's, etc you could just setup GNS3.
 
For $135 you can get a new 1810G-8 on flea bay.


It's only 8 ports, but that should be plenty for what you need to learn.


Otherwise you can get the 1810G-24 for $200. Perhaps try to resell it on down the road or chalk it up as a necessary expense in learning / getting your feet wet.
 
DD-WRT isn't worth the hassle, especially if the hardware it is running on is slow. It's a cool platform, and I use it for my personal stuff a lot.

I'm not too happy when I run into a business that has a Linksys with DD-wrt on it though. Usually they have a lot of odd intermittent problems or are rebooting their router once a week!
 
Pants said:
Doesn't GNS3 only deal with Cisco IOS ? I don't want to get into that operating system right now because it's out of the scope of what I'm trying to accomplish at this time.
Click to expand...

No. They have expanded it quite a bit. Read up on it at their website.
 
TAPtech said:
I'm not too happy when I run into a business that has a Linksys with DD-wrt on it though. Usually they have a lot of odd intermittent problems or are rebooting their router once a week!
Click to expand...

I haven't tried any of the other open firmwares yet. How are they ? Maybe I'll stick Tomato on the E3000 instead. Stonecat said it is compatible with Tomato. I had a lot of problems with DDwrt myself when I got it onto my Linksys wrt54g router.
 
Don't mean to complicate things. But you also might want to look at setting up VMWare ESXi box. If you have a fairly recent machine with plenty of RAM it will do fine. If things are tight you can just get a 1tb drive and put everything on that. Then just manually switch when you want to work in ESXi. It gives you a bare metal layer that you can load tons of OS's, including various x86 *nix flavor routers.
 
markverhyden said:
Don't mean to complicate things. But you also might want to look at setting up VMWare ESXi box. If you have a fairly recent machine with plenty of RAM it will do fine. If things are tight you can just get a 1tb drive and put everything on that. Then just manually switch when you want to work in ESXi. It gives you a bare metal layer that you can load tons of OS's, including various x86 *nix flavor routers.
Click to expand...

Granted, I will get there, eventually. :) The latter half of next year I'll probably get more into that stuff. Right now I'm polishing up my basic OSI layer 1 - 3 knowledge, and some other stuff I have on a list.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Choppie
Front Panel (WHY! In 2025 there still is no standard front panel header "plug" !!!!!!!! WHY!!!!!)
Replies
17
Views
1K
beechwood
beechwood
ludali
Hardware Dimensioning
Replies
1
Views
576
NviGate Systems
NviGate Systems
HCHTech
Alerts!
Replies
10
Views
1K
Sky-Knight
Sky-Knight
YeOldeStonecat
Before and After pics of a network distro
Replies
1
Views
991
HCHTech
HCHTech
ThatPlace928
[SOLVED] Best Recommendation for UPS
2
Replies
22
Views
4K
NETWizz
NETWizz
Back
Top