DLink vs Cisco Small Business switches

[SDGator]

I finally got sick of our unstable as heck Apple router at home and got a Ubiquity ERL and turned the Apple Airport Extreme into a wireless AP...wow I wish I had done that a long time ago. Our home network has been rock solid so far.

So, the next step in home network domination is a switch. Our home already has cat5e cables (9 total) run from all the living areas and bedrooms to the master closet. I'd like to light them all up with a switch so I can move the wireless AP to a more central location in the house that makes more sense.

I'm not a networking expert by any means, but the main goal for me is network stability and long term reliability over speed or throughput, etc. I only need 10 ports, and I'd like it to be VLAN capable.

I've been looking at the Cisco 200 series, the Cisco 300 series, and a D-Link, all around the same price range. Weirdly, the Cisco 300 with Layer 3 functionality is the cheapest of the bunch, but it also doesn't leave me with any ports to spare. If I need a port in the future, I can always get another switch?

Anyone have any words of advice on this?

Cisco 200 series, 18 ports, Layer 2 only
Cisco 300 series, 10 ports, "Lite" Layer 3
D-Link DGS-1210 series, 20 ports

 

[Cloud200]

I would strongly suggest going with more than the 10 port Cisco 300.
If you have 9 runs that means:
9 Client runs
+1 for uplink to router
+? for items in your media closet like a NAS or home theater PC

In a home, layer 3 is pretty much a waste especially if you have a router like the ERL that supports 802.1q VLANs (Unless you are doing a lot of cross VLAN traffic?).
Something else to keep in mind is POE.
I have my WAPs, Telephones and Security cameras all powered by a POE switch.

 

[AdvHomeServer]

I finally got sick of our unstable as heck Apple router at home and got a Ubiquity ERL and turned the Apple Airport Extreme into a wireless AP...wow I wish I had done that a long time ago. Our home network has been rock solid so far.

Congrats on getting your ERL to work. I bought a used one for hobby purposes and am experiencing the same setup frustrations others have made popular to mention. I've upgraded mine to 1.6 and tried the wizard, but still can't get a PC or anything connected to a switch to either get on the LAN or go out to a web page.

My next attempts will be to print the wizard's config settings and compare it to configurations on the web and see what's different.

Any hints on how to be successful here?

Re the switch: I recently found a Netgear GS108T V1 smart switch on eBay for about $30. It looks and works great, was the price of a dumb switch, and has smart switch features. Every now and then, a decent value pops up on eBay and with the used/refurb sellers on Amazon. The ERL was $79 on Amazon used like new from a seller who just saw it as a used router that sells new for $100, as opposed to a seller who could have sold it for more.

Yes, you can piggyback switches. The trade-off is price vs clutter vs convenience.

 

[SDGator]

I would strongly suggest going with more than the 10 port Cisco 300.
If you have 9 runs that means:
9 Client runs
+1 for uplink to router
+? for items in your media closet like a NAS or home theater PC

In a home, layer 3 is pretty much a waste especially if you have a router like the ERL that supports 802.1q VLANs (Unless you are doing a lot of cross VLAN traffic?).
Something else to keep in mind is POE.
I have my WAPs, Telephones and Security cameras all powered by a POE switch.

I don't do a lot of cross-VLAN traffic, so the Layer 3 is wasted in our case. And I've had two bad Netgear GS108's in a row, so I'm trying to avoid them for this round. I'm willing to pay more for the switch this time so I can get advanced logging and debug features for when the network gets wonky for some reason. I've gone too long being totally crippled in that area.

I agree with you that 10 ports isn't enough, but there is a huge price jump to Layer2 POE switches with 16+ ports. Currently, I don't have any POE devices, but I'm looking at some POE WAP's down the line. I was thinking when the time comes I'd get a Ubiquity Toughswitch POE for those and plug it into the third port on the ERL that is currently empty. The Toughswitch is a 5-port POE switch that costs around $88.

So, right now I'm leaning towards the 20-port D-Link or the 18 port Cisco 200 paired with a TS-POE down the line. Any thoughts on which way to go?

On another note, are you running POE telephones at home? Which models and provider are you using, if you don't mind my asking?

 

[SDGator]

Congrats on getting your ERL to work. I bought a used one for hobby purposes and am experiencing the same setup frustrations others have made popular to mention. I've upgraded mine to 1.6 and tried the wizard, but still can't get a PC or anything connected to a switch to either get on the LAN or go out to a web page.

My next attempts will be to print the wizard's config settings and compare it to configurations on the web and see what's different.

Any hints on how to be successful here?

Re the switch: I recently found a Netgear GS108T V1 smart switch on eBay for about $30. It looks and works great, was the price of a dumb switch, and has smart switch features. Every now and then, a decent value pops up on eBay and with the used/refurb sellers on Amazon. The ERL was $79 on Amazon used like new from a seller who just saw it as a used router that sells new for $100, as opposed to a seller who could have sold it for more.

Yes, you can piggyback switches. The trade-off is price vs clutter vs convenience.

Man, I'm sorry to hear about your troubles with the ERL. My big roadblock was getting my computer to connect with its web interface in the first place. I thought it was bricked right out of the box for a little bit. Once I got past that it was fairly smooth sailing.

I did find that when I plugged it into my network to go live with it, I needed to power cycle my cable modem to get it to recognize the ERL. Maybe give that a try?

I'll definitely keep an eye out on eBay for some good used equipment. My only hesitation there is getting someone else's bricked equipment.

 

[azazel1024]

I would look at the TP-Link SG2216 instead of any of the 3 you just posted. The cheapest out of all of them. It is what I use for my core.

If you'd rather look at DLink, look at the DGS1100 series instead of the 1210 series. Cheaper and has all of the features you'd want (I am using a DGS-1100-05, 5 port semi-managed for my entertainment center).

I'd go more than 10 ports if you already have 9 wired ports needed. You never know when you might need to wire in a couple of extra things. Another access point, network printer, NAS or server, etc. etc.

 

[AdvHomeServer]

Man, I'm sorry to hear about your troubles with the ERL. My big roadblock was getting my computer to connect with its web interface in the first place. I thought it was bricked right out of the box for a little bit. Once I got past that it was fairly smooth sailing.

I did find that when I plugged it into my network to go live with it, I needed to power cycle my cable modem to get it to recognize the ERL. Maybe give that a try?

I'll definitely keep an eye out on eBay for some good used equipment. My only hesitation there is getting someone else's bricked equipment.

I connected to my ISP with no problems. DHCP with them worked fine. LAN 1 looked fine but wouldn't recognize any attached devices or go out to the internet. Did you just plug in and go like any other router after running the wizard or did you have to configure some stuff like DHCP or DNS or the firewall?

There's a pattern to eBay. Most established sellers are terrified of bad reports from customers sent to eBay. This helps with quality and makes returns easier. Just make sure you're dealing with someone in your country. Nothing is more annoying than buying something really cheap and then noticing it's coming from China and will take a month to be delivered. Amazon sometimes has better prices for secondary market items.

 

[SDGator]

I would look at the TP-Link SG2216 instead of any of the 3 you just posted. The cheapest out of all of them. It is what I use for my core.

If you'd rather look at DLink, look at the DGS1100 series instead of the 1210 series. Cheaper and has all of the features you'd want (I am using a DGS-1100-05, 5 port semi-managed for my entertainment center).

I'd go more than 10 ports if you already have 9 wired ports needed. You never know when you might need to wire in a couple of extra things. Another access point, network printer, NAS or server, etc. etc.

Yeah, at this point I'm going with a switch with 16 or more ports. How long have you been using the SG2216? Has it been pretty stable and reliable? The more expensive switches have more features that I probably won't use, but I'm assuming more expensive means ever closer to enterprise levels of reliability. That might be a bad assumption on my part, at least in the sub-$200 price range.

 

[SDGator]

I connected to my ISP with no problems. DHCP with them worked fine. LAN 1 looked fine but wouldn't recognize any attached devices or go out to the internet. Did you just plug in and go like any other router after running the wizard or did you have to configure some stuff like DHCP or DNS or the firewall?

There's a pattern to eBay. Most established sellers are terrified of bad reports from customers sent to eBay. This helps with quality and makes returns easier. Just make sure you're dealing with someone in your country. Nothing is more annoying than buying something really cheap and then noticing it's coming from China and will take a month to be delivered. Amazon sometimes has better prices for secondary market items.

Good to know about eBay. I'll keep watching for deals on there, then.

Here were my steps to setup the ERL:
- I attached it directly to my laptop using an ethernet cable (so, not on the network)
- Upgraded the firmware to 1.5 (1.6 was released, but I couldn't find it on the download page)
- Ran the wizard.
- Added a new admin user and deleted the default ubnt user
- Backed up the config and posted it to Ubiquiti's forums to make sure I wasn't missing any critical security configs for firewall or the like. It was good. No need to mess with DHCP or DNS or firewall or anything.
- Once they gave the all-clear, I shut off DHCP on my Apple Airport Extreme and plugged the ERL in between the cable modem and the Airport.
- Once the ERL was up, I power-cycled the cable modem and had connectivity out to the internet pretty instantly. Other than adding/deleting admin users, I did no post-wizard edits.
- I let it run vanilla like that for a few days before doing anything else like assigning static IP's for different things on the LAN.
- Once I found the download link for the 1.6 firmware, I downloaded that and upgraded the firmware, but didn't rerun the wizard.

Its been running like a champ for a week or two now. Its been pretty awesome. Have you tried posting your config to the ubnt forums? They responded back to me within hours. And if they can't figure it out, I've seen a few posts on there where the engineers will tell folks they need to RMA their router. If all else fails, it might be that yours has some manufacturing issue.

 

[azazel1024]

Yeah, at this point I'm going with a switch with 16 or more ports. How long have you been using the SG2216? Has it been pretty stable and reliable? The more expensive switches have more features that I probably won't use, but I'm assuming more expensive means ever closer to enterprise levels of reliability. That might be a bad assumption on my part, at least in the sub-$200 price range.

The only issue I had was a result of a power surge where it would only switch packets between certain ports afterwards (the power surge friend my FIOS ONT box). It took about 2 weeks to figure out why some stuff wasn't able to ping or access my server or some other devices off the switch. Power cycling didn't work, but pushing the factory reset DID work.

Other than that issue, which I wouldn't really consider the switch's fault, it has been rock steady since I bought it...dunno, maybe 20 months ago? I don't use all of the features, but I've played with VLANs, loopback/spanning tree, QoS, Link Aggregation (which I do use), ACLs and bandwidth limiting and all work great. Also played with the SFP ports, but that is a vague curiosity thing. I happen to have a couple of 1000base-SX LC modules my brother gave me that he wasn't using, so I got a $3 1m fiber cable to hook up my SG2216 and my Trendnet TEG160sw to try them out. Works like a charm (I do have a future need to run some fiber to an outbuilding, so it isn't entirely "for no reason).

The TEG160sw is also decent, btw. However, at least the model I have (one version back from current) the interface is kind of clunky and it is a mild power hog compared to the SG2216 (uses something like 11w with 4 ports active, compared to 9w that my SG2216 is using with about 8 ports active, I know, a little spltting hairs). I did get it used for $50 shipped, compared to the $110 new (on sale) that I got my SG2216 for. It does the basics that I need though of SFP ports (just for testing, I'll use the port(s) on my SG2216 when the time comes), VLANs and Link Aggregation. Oh and 16 extra ports (I currently only need 5 ports over my SG2216's capacity, but that is slowly expanding as I renovate bits of my house and add more LAN drops)).

PS The only thing I don't like about the SG2216, is that if you change anything in the configuration, you have to do a seperate SAVE CONFIG. If you don't do that and you power cycle the switch, any configuration changes will be lost. I had forgotten that little fact once when I made some changes and then powered it off because of some really nasty weather blowing through (tropical storm). When I started everything up, my DVR couldn't get out the internet. Long story short, it lost my link aggregation group to my other switch, and the loop basic crashed connectivty to the switch, which had my MoCA brdige on it for the DVR...but intraswitch traffic kept working despite the loop present. Opps. Took me about 2hrs to figure out what the blistering heck was wrong and why only my DVR couldn't get to the internet.

 

[Cloud200]

I don't do a lot of cross-VLAN traffic, so the Layer 3 is wasted in our case. And I've had two bad Netgear GS108's in a row, so I'm trying to avoid them for this round. I'm willing to pay more for the switch this time so I can get advanced logging and debug features for when the network gets wonky for some reason. I've gone too long being totally crippled in that area.

I agree with you that 10 ports isn't enough, but there is a huge price jump to Layer2 POE switches with 16+ ports. Currently, I don't have any POE devices, but I'm looking at some POE WAP's down the line. I was thinking when the time comes I'd get a Ubiquity Toughswitch POE for those and plug it into the third port on the ERL that is currently empty. The Toughswitch is a 5-port POE switch that costs around $88.

So, right now I'm leaning towards the 20-port D-Link or the 18 port Cisco 200 paired with a TS-POE down the line. Any thoughts on which way to go?

On another note, are you running POE telephones at home? Which models and provider are you using, if you don't mind my asking?

So first off, if you are going to connect something on the same VLAN to your edgerouter, don't do it with a bridge port. It will work but it will also be far slower than connecting directly to your core switch (the new unit in this case). Just take port eth0 for your internet, eth1 to port 1 on your switch, port 2 on your switch to port 1 on the POE switch.

My phones are Panasonic running off of a KX-TDE100 PBX unit
Using standard POTs lines