Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 7 years and 11 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.
Last week at work we received a pair of Netgear ProSafe gigabit managed click switches (the 8-port GSS108E and 16-port GSS116E) to outfit a conference room. I was impressed with the mounting options and after seeing the 8-port one was less than $50 on Amazon, I decided to get one for my home office.
The GSS108E replaced a TRENDnet TEG-S80g (a sturdy metal, 8-port gigabit switch), which I had sitting on top of my standing desk. The click switch can be mounted in four different ways, and the power cable attaches in two different ways to accommodate most installations. I attached the plastic mounting plate to the underside of my desk (with the included screws but opted not to use the additional adhesive pads), clicked the switch onto the plate, and then re-ran my cabling. The result is a cleaner desktop and some extra USB charging ports easily accessible under the desk. Unfortunately in this position the labels on the ports are upside down, which seems like a slight design oversight.
The plastic GSS108E and metal GSS116E are managed switches, so you can log into their web interfaces and do some basic configuration like setting up VLANs, enabling QoS, configuring mirror ports, performing cable tests, or turning off the LEDs. Not features I need in my home office but not bad for a sub-$50 piece of hardware.
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- Netgear GSS108E
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- GSS108E management interface
I got the regular form factor of these switches and ran into issues. I wanted them specifically for VLAN support for my home VMWare lab. The issue I encountered is with the egress VLAN Tagging. The way I’m setup at home due to limited access to Ethernet cabling is that I’d need to use 3 VLANS. But the challenge comes in when you add multiple other switches to the mix. I have a switch in my air handler closet where my ISP router resides, then a cross connect cable connects a switch in my office which is where the VMWare server resides. In the VLAN settings, the egress VLAN defaults were causing a problem. When you use multiple VLANS across multiple of these switches, I couldn’t find a way to allow two VLANS to share the cross connect port that connects the two switches. Maybe I didn’t look into it it enough, but I had so many issues – then ended up just setting it back to default without configuring any VLANS. Oh well.