[geeks] Seems like low-cost Cisco 10/100 switches are available

[Joshua Boyd]

On Apr 28, 2008, at 6:26 AM, Jonathan Groll wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 11:31:59AM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> I'm not too tuned into the used equipment market, but I just  
>> noticed that surpluscomputers.com has 24 port refurbished Cisco  
>> switches (2924XL) for $65/each. That seems to be a good deal for  
>> someone looking to upgrade their home infrastructure from  
>> commodity hardware to enterprise hardware.
>>
>
> This is something I'm trying to understand - in the home environment
> surely there would be greater benefit from buying a gigabit commodity
> switch rather than a 'good' 100M managed switched, especially if your
> home LAN is of a simple structure with just a single good-enough
> switch. Since I've never owned enterprise-grade switches, please feel
> free to educate ;-)

Thats depends on what you are doing and what you want.

I don't think  a commodity gige switch is going to offer things like  
vlans or port mirroring, and I could see more advanced home users  
wanting both.  And I know I've heard people say they need the ability  
to turn off auto-negotiate and just set the port settings to the  
correct values to make things work with various fun equipment.