At some point over the many months I had stopped looking for these switches and then today I saw that they are available on the CDW site. The price for the 3560-c model is $1,350.00 approximately. For what you are getting that is very reasonable. It is a bit pricey for 10 port dumb gig switch but if you were to use it right it would be a very good buy.

Until next time,
TechStop (JW)

This is the name of the switch. These names are not relevant to the operation of the switch but make you finding it invaluable.
hostname “Switch-1″

This value should be something that you won’t hit easily but not so high that it will eat into the memory of your switch. In order for this value to take effect you need to reboot the switch. I typically take the maximum number of VLANs That I am going to create and add 10. That way I know that I have room to grow but it is still reasonable.
max-vlans 20

This is the time zone that you are in in minutes. So central time would be -360 or -6 hours. If you were in a province with say a 30 minute offset you could accmodate accordingly.
time timezone -300

Daylight savings time settings, you have to love them. You will have to look at the options to see what works for you but their list works for most people.
time daylight-time-rule Continental-US-and-Canada

A good one to use if you. This is a setting lets you turn on routing on a switch. I like to turn this on regardless because that way I am not going back and changing the switch after the fact. Security is a possible issue here to take that into consideration.
ip routing

VLAN 1 is the default VLAN. Usualy, you will want to have this empty since you shouldn’t be using it. Best practice is to create your own VLANs and use those.
vlan 1

The name of VLAN out of the box, name it whatever you want. This will show up in Procurve Manager if you choose to install that piece of software.
name “DEFAULT_VLAN”

This is the setting to remove VLANs from VLAN 1. Keeping VLANs out of VLAN 1 is a good idea. Also note that I have letters in the port names. This is the case if you have a modular switch like 5400. A non-modular switch would simply have number without the letters.
no untagged A1-A24,B1-B22

You don’t always won’t an IP address on a routing switch for every VLAN especially if it doesn’t have any ports assigned to it.
no ip address
exit

An additional VLAN on the same switch.
vlan 10

Name of the switch, but we already covered this.
name “DATA”

This is a native VLAN switch port in the Cisco world. For example, port A3 will receive traffic that is untagged and put that traffic into this VLAN.
untagged A3-A5,A7-A24,B1,B3-B8,B10-B16,B18-B19,B21-B22

If you want one or two IPs on the VLAN go ahead and add those here. Keep in mind that if you turned on routing on the switch with the command “ip routing” that it will do just that via this IP address.
ip address 10.10.10.151 255.255.0.0

This is a non-native VLAN in Cisco trunking lingo. For example, port A1 will take traffic that is tagged with VLAN 10 and put it into this VLAN. Every port can only have 1 untagged VLAN but many tagged VLANs assigned to it.
tagged A1-A2,B9
exit

This command times out inactive console or telnet or SSH sessions. This is especially good since HP Procurve doesn’t do this by default.
console inactivity-timer 30

This sends any syslog data to the configured IP. Once such place may be HP Procurve Manager.
logging 10.2.1.43

The next few commands turn on the time service so that the logs and time on your switch have a point of reference. SNTP is a really really good idea since it will help you know what happened when on the network.
timesync sntp
sntp unicast
sntp server priority 1 216.234.161.11
sntp server priority 2 72.249.38.88

Since we turned on the routing for this switch we need to configure a default gateway and this is how we do that.
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 10.10.10.1

SNMP settings, configure these depending on if you need them or not.
snmp-server community “Test” operator
snmp-server host 10.10.10.2 community “public”

Location is always helpful especially for troubleshooting. If you have any more than 5 or so switches knowing at a glance what switch is where will make a lot easier. This also updates the location in HP PCM if you are using that software.
snmp-server location “Computer Room”

These turn on the spanning-tree protocol in order to prevent loops in the network. I highly recommend you turn this on. Even if you don’t use these exact settings anything will help.
spanning-tree
spanning-tree force-version rstp-operation

And there you go, that is the basics of a Procurve configuration. Of course there is always more to do such as QoS but this will get anyone started.

Until next time,
TechStop (JW)

I say that this is about time. Cisco knows that it needs to reduce and simplify its product lines. This is a good step towards that, they just need to pick up the pace.

Until next time,
TechStop (JW)

The switches aren’t on sale yet so price is a bit of mystery but the feature set and marketing material is up on their website already. According to the site the “C” in the model name means compact. As for the features the site says “provide all the capabilities and benefits of the enterprise-class Cisco Catalyst 2960-S and 3560-X Series Switches, including enhanced limited lifetime warranty.” For such a small size the feature set is pretty extensive. Now if the price is truly SMB then these little switches could be useful beyond the 5 person office.

Cisco 2960-C and 3560-C Series Swtiches: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11527/Products_Sub_Category_Home.html

Until next time,
TechStop