Switch questions

[Velvis]

I have a client with two rooms separated by a cement wall.

At some point someone drilled a hole just big enough for one Ethernet cable.

On one side of the wall there is a switch that feeds that room (2 phones, 2 computers (1 cable into phone then pass through to the PC)), a printer, and then a cable through the wall into another switch with the same configuration on the other side.

Would there be an advantage in streamlining this into 1 switch and drilling a bigger hole to pass through more than one cable?




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[Markverhyden]

Dimensions? Potential for site changes? Wall construction? Depending on the situation I'll sometimes use a 5/8 port switch rather than running some new cabling. Makes IMAC much easier.

 

[trevm999]

If you don't have stackable switches or any 10Gbps ports, you'd just be daisy chaining 48 port switches using 1Gbps ports anyway once you have too many drops for one switch.

Just make sure any switches outside of the wiring closet are well documented. If both switches are Gigabit and are establishing a gigabit connection, then there probably isn't any benefit to the business to change anything there.

There might be more value in a direct line from that switch to the PC, since the switch in the phone is probably only 100Mbps. But that's probably not necessary until they are actually experiencing a bottleneck.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I'd likely say for just 2x rooms with 2x computers/phones each....probably not worth trying to upgrade at this point. Depends what they're doing. How's the voice quality for those phones?

Ideally you want to avoid daisy chaining switches like that. You want to have multiple switches each have a direct home run to a "top of the rack" switch...where the servers and gateway/firewall are. Least amount of hops from each PC right to that TOR switch.

Hopefully the phones are new enough to be gigabit passthough.