LAN renovations

With bluebells and daffodils already in flower, Spring must nearly be sprung. It certainly seems I've an (almost) uncontrollable urge to tidy and replace things that have been working perfectly well for a number of years. :-)

Now I've got voice traffic running on my LAN I thought it was high time to practice what I preach and to introduce some management. Up until now I have been employing unmanaged switches and wireless access points to provide the necessary number of Ethernet ports. The move to fully managed switches and the added functionality they can provide has simply not been worth the investment. Unfortunately, that's pretty much still the case.

However, with recent product announcements I believed there was a compromise to be had. I decided to do half a job (yes, unusual for me I know) and procured a few Linksys "Business Series" devices. I understand this product range to be somewhere in between the Linksys SOHO products and their big-brother Cisco entry level equipment, the real proper stuff.

A Linksys SRW2008MP 8-port PoE managed switch and a pair of SLM2008 8-port "smart" (managed-lite?) switches have replaced the erstwhile unmanaged switching. The former is described as "fully managed" whilst the latter two offer "entry-level management at a cost-effective price point" only via an "easy to use" browser-based interface. Between them they have all the bits I'd like; PoE ports (on the "MP" device), 802.1q VLANs, port mirroring, basic QoS suitable for voice and, as a bonus, gigabit performance.

Now that I've lived with them for a couple of days, I'm happy to report I have not yet regretted my investment. Unusually, one of the little switches was DOA but obtaining a replacement was no trouble. The new boxes look very handsome, run cool and quiet and their metal cases give them a quality feel. I'd be happier still if the power plug was a little harder to pull out, not very well thought out IMHO.

Having PoE is great. The bigger switch powers the two smaller switches, a camera and a couple of IP phones, keeping things nice and neat (and remotely rebootable!). Things are much neater after the IP renumbering, better segregation has greatly improved security and all the documentation is up to date. I even took the opportunity to finish populating a suitably sized patch panel so I won't need to crawl around the back of anything any more.

Having the ability to "shut/no shut" ports remotely is a welcome relief and performance is lightning fast for the devices that can take advantage of the gigabit line speed. The web management is very adequate for most tasks although I'm going to have to look at how I get some better reporting.