Araknis

[Hans Manhave]

Anyone use(d) the products of Araknis?  www.araknisnetworks.com

[Jeff Golas]

I was going to make fun of them touting leds and jacks on the front as a feature, until I realized they offer switches with jacks on front OR on the back. I really like that idea as I have a couple places (server racks) where I wish the jacks were on the rear (or better yet, I wish they just offered a remote LED panel that can mounted in the front of the rack, but the switch itself can be mounted on the back.

[Mark]

I have not.  What it comes down to for me is CLEAR manageability and reliability when it comes to switches.  That is why my preference is Cisco Catalyst.  Sure, it's expensive taste, but it gets the job done very well, so you can focus on other things.

rant:

I recently spent HOURS (actually multiple days,all day long) trying to figure out why a vlan was not working on a low-end Cisco SGE - which is actually Linksys - web managed switch.  I could not pass any vlan traffic on a trunk group between switches.  Turns out it was user-error, of course, because when trying to assign the vlans to the trunk, the page would refresh upon every click!  There was no CLEAR way to view the config without click through a bunch of junk, settings needed to be done in multiple places to get things to work, and it was just very frustrating.  I had this same feelings towards the HP Procurve we used to have and all the ones the school used to have.

Anyway, I finally realized that when I would go to the vlan page, select the trunk group I want to configure, then select he vlan I am adding to it, the page would refresh and I would click on PORT 2 instead of GROUP 2 and it would error.  A real Cisco switch does not need to have vlans assigned when creating a trunk unless you are EXCLUDING vlans.  This was extremely frustrating to me and as only emphasized my preference towards Cisco Catalyst - where you can view an entire switch config in clear plain text all on one page.

/rant (SORRY!)

So, I guess the moral of my rant would be to understand your needs and get something that you feel comfortable with.  If you will never ever have to change any settings on the switch, then that's one less thing to worry about.

[Jeff Golas]

Thats why I've been learning to like CLI's for these things. Got several VLans set up on our Procurves with no issues.

[Mark]

Thats why I've been learning to like CLI's for these things. Got several VLans set up on our Procurves with no issues.

Yeah, CLI is a must-have for me for sure.  My configs are very simple (to me at least).  I did not like the HP CLI, but that is just my preference.  I do NOT like web managed switches.  Period.  put it all in front of my face at once so that i can see everything matches and everything is right.

[Billy Welsh]

Catalysts are the preferred flavor here as well.  The engineers do not hesitate to buy them used off ebay.