Sunday and Monday mornings found us up on lifts with our heads stuck in boxes while swaying back and forth fearing for our lives.
We found out the hard way that these devices were configured as layer 2 switches, and there is no command line interface. It's all web GUI, and the GUI is barely configurable for what we wanted to do.
We found that we could click on each port and tell it what kind of device is attached to each port. By telling each port that a desktop and phone was connected...

Bob_McMillen

Now that VLANs and phone commands are set up and the trunking commands are ready to tie the switches together, we are ready to make this work.
I first started with the core switches which were Cisco 3750's in a cluster of three. After inputting the commands the workstations started to come on line along with the phones.
But there was an entire section of servers we couldn't get to come online. We found out that those servers were hanging off a layer 2 switch. Now that complicates...

Bob_McMillen

In the last segment I wrote about VLANs and using them to segment network traffic. Rather than do this the traditional way we were going to use VLANs to segment traffic from particular devices.
When you first turn on any Cisco router or switch it automatically communicates on VLAN 1. If you want to add VLANs you have to choose a different subnet. For instance VLAN 1 can be 192.168.0.0/24 and the VLAN 2 could be 192.168.1.0/24. The /24 means the last octet is used for host addresses on...

Bob_McMillen

This week I had the hardest project so far this year. Our project was to re subnet a company in preparation for a merger. Since both companies had some crossover subnets we had to change one side so both sides can communicate.
Changing a subnet is basically changing the IP addresses that the network communicates on to go to a new set of addresses. Since no two IP addresses can exist on a network you have to be careful when you have multiple offices with hundreds or thousands of devices....

Bob_McMillen