Uplinks on my switch--can I do this

negated

Hi everyone.
I need a 10G link from my PC to my Switch, which only has 1Gb links, it does however have 10Gb uplinks, so am wondring if I can connect my PC to one of my switches 10Gb uplinks and then be able to connect a NAS to one of my switches other 10Gb uplinks.

Will this work and routing also work so I can connect this 10Gb PC to any device on my switch.
I don't really want to buy a 10Gb switch if I can avoid it and use what I have.

Thanks

keyser

@negated Yes it will. “Uplink switchports” are switchports exactly as the rest of the ports in the switch. The only difference is their linkspeed and likely physical interface (SFP+ instead of RJ45).

negated

@keyser Thank you for posting.
Would it be correct to assume if I use one of the 10Gb ports on my switch it would need to be set to a non trunk port, otherwise it will not be accessable from the PC connected to that 10Gb port.

Also, would this be a good purchase at a low price new, or is it too low specced compared.
https://www.dlink.com/en/products/dgs-1520-52-layer-3-stackable-smart-managed-switch

keyser

@negated said in Uplinks on my switch--can I do this:

@keyser Thank you for posting.
Would it be correct to assume if I use one of the 10Gb ports on my switch it would need to be set to a non trunk port, otherwise it will not be accessable from the PC connected to that 10Gb port.

Also, would this be a good purchase at a low price new, or is it too low specced compared.
https://www.dlink.com/en/products/dgs-1520-52-layer-3-stackable-smart-managed-switch

You can use the port(s) in trunk or access mode as you see fit. You just have to make sure the devices you want to see oneanother directly are in the same VLAN.
Equally important you have to ensure downlink devices respect the switchport mode (IE: If in trunk mode, the downstream device must also be running “trunk mode”/tagged VLANs)

I cannot speak to the quality of that particular switch. My own experience with D-link switches is they are cheap as hell for a reason. I would never buy them for anything as “advanced” as multiple VLANs and trunks/LAGs and what not. They never get proper firmware updates and are quite “buggy”.
For a pure L2/single VLAN switch they are fine.

EDIT: You can get INFINITELY better used HPE / ARUBA / CISCO / JUNIPER switches for the same amount. Just be sure to check their age/powerusage - you can get quite recent models (low powerusage) and you will have a switch for life.

EDIT 2: But I should say I’m VERY picky with switches because I work with them on a daily basis. And life is just too short for poor/nonexisting CLI enabled switches that are not firmware maintained for 7+ years by the vendor. Only then can you be fairly sure that it will eventually be a VERY stable and featureproof switch (in it’s pricerange)

negated

@keyser Thank you for the good advise.
I did think about second hand HP or Dell, but without being in the business there is just too many pitfalls for me, Lisencing for one, it seems they like to charge a recurring lisence fee, especially Cisco.
Then I read about nightmares of people buying second hand, lots on fleebay with no first owner invoice, and if they are locked in some way the first owners would be the only one with the registered login details to the manufacturers site, where the switch was first registered, so no support of any kind.
I hear ZyXel are a good switch, but setting them up for vlans seems to be rather a challenge.

AndyRH

@negated I have an Aruba and a ZyXel. The Aruba is "easy" even though I do OS stuff for a living. ZyXel switches may cause hair loss.

My Aruba is configured similar to your plans. 10Gb (DAC) from pfSense and 10Gb (SFP+) to my ZyXel. One port is access and the other is trunked. I had to edit the uplink ports to get them out of uplink mode, but it was simple.

My Aruba came from Ebay. It was new old stock. Never powered on and only 4 years past the last firmware. If you are careful you can find bargains. Trash is also for sale as you mentioned.

keyser

@negated Yeah, there is the licensing/firmware access issue on many of the “established” vendor brands - ESPECIALLY Cisco.
And I do understand the risks of bying used.

That dlink probably fills your needs just fine, and perhaps they have gotten better at doing firmwares - including supporting their products with firmware updates instead of just making a new switch model to buy.
Alternatively I think many find Ubiquity/Unify to be rather good value for money. Personally I don’t like the need to run a management service on a server to use their features, but I get the unified management can be a great advantage if you have lots of their networking equipment.

I myself use both the old HPE/Aruba Procurve + the new Aruba CX because they are very robustly featured, licensefree and have limited lifetime warranty, and they do run forever.
I have seen hundreds of the old procurve switches go 20+ years without ever encountering a hiccup.

Where I live you can find HPE/Aruba 2540-24G PoE switches used for around 200-250$, and that’s a VERY good switch for that kind of money. I would never even consider any of the new alternatives because they are more expensive, WAY inferior hardware, and are at best feature equivalent.

negated

@AndyRH Thank you for posting.
Is 4 years past the last update not looking for trouble, there will be a lot of vulnerabillities over that time.
On another note, I need to get a switch with 2.5G poe+ aswell, because 1G poe+ is too slow for my access points, and they are only going to get faster.

May I ask what make your ZyXel is, and do you think the build quality is up to the Aruba, and how is the software stability of the ZyXEL.
I was looking the the Aruba range, it is difficult to get 2.5G poe without spending a lot of money, the one I found with 2.4G has only got SFP uplinks up to 2.5G, so will not work for my 10G PC.
HP E Aruba S6X72A
https://www.amazon.ie/HP-E-Aruba-S6X72A/dp/B0H762899H

negated

@keyser Thank you for posting.
I completely agree regarding the quality of the HPE switches compared to the new off brand ones. Their firmware updates for 5 years after EOS is just fantastic.
I have the problem that not alone am I new to networking and know very little, but this is confounded by not knowing the age of the HPE offerings on the second hand market, and could end up with a jurasic era device, with zero hope of support.
I found one swirch that does 2.5G wich I also need for my fast access points, but why on earth did HPE put SPF at only 2.5 and 1G on it, basically crippled it.
HP E Aruba S6X72A
https://www.amazon.ie/HP-E-Aruba-S6X72A/dp/B0H762899H
I will give the model you mentioned a look to see what it has to offer, thanks.

keyser

@negated Yeah, 2.5G is almost nonexistant in all the major vendors “proper” switch portfolio unless it’s full 1/2.5/5/(10)G Smartrate ports and the switch cost the same as a car. You won’t find any default 2.5G ports in the HPE/Aruba range at all.
Then one you linked to is a HPE switch from the COMWARE part of the business (Old 3COM and today a majority owned chinese company that HPE has a large stake in). It has nothing to do with the Aruba portfolio and HPE Procurve “legacy” portfolio.
They work just fine, but are not very userfriendly nor energy efficient - and they are noisy as hell.

So if 2.5G is a must, then youre probably forced to pick up one of the cheaper less supported alternatives.

EDIT: But, think the 2.5G needs over. I have yet to see any single/few client WiFi usage actually saturate 1Gbe uplink. It will afterall require sustained 1000Mbps+ wireless transfer which is both very hard to achieve in practice, and at the same time need in a sustained fashion (massive repeated transfers to a Local NAS or?)
The backside of 2.5G switches is higher power usage and noise, although the cheaper vendors is less troubled by that because they sell cheap featureless (no ASICS) switches.

negated

@keyser said in Uplinks on my switch--can I do this:

(no ASICS) switches.

What is a (no ASICS) switch.
I found a HPE, seems to be very new model, with 8 multi gig 1- 2.5 - and 10G ports, 4 with poe+ and 4 with Poe++
and two 10G sfp ports.

Model: HPE Networking
Networking Instant On 1940 - Switch - L2+ - Managed - 4 x 100/1000/2.5G/5G/10GBase-T + 4 x 100/1000/2.5G/5G/10G (PoE++) + 2 x 1 Gigabit / 10 Gigabit SFP+ (uplink) - side to side airflow - rack-mountable, wall-mountable, table-top mountable, under-tabe.
700.00 euro though.
https://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?manufacturer=HPE&mancode=S4A36A%23ACC

keyser

@negated An ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Chip) equipped switch, is a switch that can do more than switching packets. It has an integrated chip that can do traffic policing (filtering, throtteling, monitoring, copy’ing and such) at wire speed on switchports.
So fx. In my Aruba CX 6100 switch I have written Traffic Access control Lists that filters IPv4/IPv6 traffic at the port ingress level (IE filtered before it ever enters the switch for switching. I use this to specifically deny some kinds of traffic between clients in the same VLAN (Traffic that never reaches a firewall) and deny some clients from seeing each other all together while they can see shared devices. I also categorically filter all IPv6 traffic at the VLAN level so no IPv6 packet ever is switched (can be misused locally).
I could also use it to copy all UDP 53 (DNS) frames from clients to non-local DNS servers to a specific switchport for analysis.
Combine this with 802.1x or MAC authentication so you get individual ACLs assigned to every client connected to the switch, and you have a LOT OF POWER!
The options are endless - very very powerfull for security and monitoring ;-)

And you get quite a few of the same features in the procurve 2540-24G (Also ASICs equipped) used for 200$….. Makes it hard to consider cheap china crap with no features once you have had it :-)
But you also have to use it, otherwise it’s not something to consider.

The Instant ON switches are quite good quality (rebranded and changed software editions of HPE Procurve hardware). They do posses good features depending on models, but really only makes GOOD sense if you change your APs to Instant ON as well, and enyoy the VERY easy and capable cloud monitoring and management it comes with.

AndyRH

@negated said in Uplinks on my switch--can I do this:

Is 4 years past the last update not looking for trouble, there will be a lot of vulnerabillities over that time.

Well, it is 10 years now. A switch that is only accessible from my home network is an acceptable risk. 48 PoE ports and 4x 10Gb uplinks meets my needs and the price was right. The only vulnerabilities I am aware of are DOS for the management interface.

The ZyXel switch is a XGS1210-12. I bought it for the 2.5Gb and SFP+ ports. VLANs on it are difficult if you are used to enterprise switches. Maybe easier for someone who does not know better. Once I figured it out it works fine with the trunked 10Gb port and the 5 or 6 things plugged into it. Construction is nice, metal case and no fans. It gets a bit warm, but nothing that worries me.

keyser

@AndyRH Which Aruba switch model do you have. If it’s been 4 years since the last firmware update for it, it must be close to 10 years old and have been sitting in stock for loooong while.

johnpoz

@keyser said in Uplinks on my switch--can I do this:

Just be sure to check their age/powerusage

I wanted to quote this part of power usage.. And also mention noise.. While you can quite often find cheap used enterprise gear.. And prices hard to beat for the feature set. But if this home, small office the noise could be a serious issue. And the power usage might eat up your savings in a few years just with sitting there pretty much idle pulling 200W.

But agree once start using a full featured switch - it would be hard to go back to anything less.

AndyRH

@keyser said in Uplinks on my switch--can I do this:

Which Aruba switch model do you have

I was not clear, when I bought it it was 4 years past the last firmware. The last firmware was 2017. It is an Aruba S2500 48 PoE+ switch.

It is a good switch, but I have been watching for something less old that fits my needs and is not crazy expensive. This one was $125 to the door.

Uglybrian

@keyser Since the poster is in Europe. Do you have any opinions or experience with Mikro Tik?

keyser

@AndyRH Ahh, yeah, that is an old bugger these days :-)

keyser

@Uglybrian said in Uplinks on my switch--can I do this:

@keyser Since the poster is in Europe. Do you have any opinions or experience with Mikro Tik?

Personally I don't work with Microtik as most/all their features are software only and thus is very performance/feature unpredictable when speeds picks up. So I have no opinion of my own, but I have several colleagues I respect very much that have Microtik In very high regard because they have so many features and are very open.
Microtik excels in offering advanced features WAY above the basic dlink/netgear switches - actually similar to the enterprise switches I'm suggesting. But you must understand on microtik it's done in software only.
I sense my colleagues think the hardware quality is good for the price, and they are well supported by Microtik and especially the large community. But do not use it for complicated/advanced setups at higher speeds, as the CPU then bottlenecks (No ASIC).

For this setup - sure, this is well within what can be done by good software at speed, so Microtik is definitively a good option here.

negated

@keyser Mikrotik does offloading to hardware, and can run at wire speed between the Marvel chip and the ports.
I am not experiencd enough to use their stuff, I believe one can not even do vlans out of the box without first going into commandline and create interfaces with vlan ID and such, I would be interested in learning how to do this, BUT, all of their switches that I have looked at are 200,000 hours between failures, in comparison to other brands this is way less than 1/3 rd.
I then seen a video on yppppuuutuuube where a guy with knowledge pointed out in one of their 10GB switches that they use cheap capacitors that tend to dry out and give up, this is why their specifications for MTBF are so low, so am giving them a miss.

Well I found a Cisco at what I think is reasonable money,
Cisco Catalyst 1200-24P-4X
I have not looked elsewherre to compare pricing yet.

Are these known to be reliable, does anyone know what year they came out and what after EOL support is available for them. Am behind a firewall anyway, reliability is my number 1 concern.

425.00 new. With its four SFP+ ports I will have my 10GB connections, I only need two, so can have them in rj45 / DAC and fiberoptic. This should serve my needs.

I was wanting intervlan, and the ability to route between vlans to take the stress of my router and be able to pass data at the 10Gb speed instead of being restricted to my routers lower speed.

Not sure this switch can do all of that, may be someone on here will know.
https://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?manufacturer=CISCO&mancode=C1200-24P-4X