Cisco switches

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Just after some advice in regards to purchasing a cisco switch.

I thinking of getting a Cisco 2800 series, just to pay about with when I get my lab set up going.

Are these any good or does anyone have any better recommendations.

Cheers

Ed

 

Hey Sparky

Just want to get a better understanding of what goes on.

I'm at that point where I need to change from 1st line and start branching out.

Ed

 

If you are a Cisco learning student you can get/use Packet Tracer, or failing that there is other software out there that will emulate cisco switches.

Obviously long term you want to get some hands on physical learning, but short term you can use the above to get a feel for command line and how to configure various aspects of Cisco devices etc.

 

You can use Packet Tracer to learn switching, you can do a few labs around vlans, spanning tree, ether-channel etc
If you want to take it to the next level I would say try get your hands on a ASA5505/Cisco 800s and replace it with your home router.
This is a great way to get familiar with things on the firewall/routing side you get the experience of setting up the WAN details PPPoe etc.
When I started learning networking I swapped my home router out with a ASA5505 which my work place was giving away. I started playing with the QOS features restricting access to certain sites, traffic shaping limiting bandwidth on streaming devices like Nowtv boxes, xboxes.
I put my home network in a real world scenario, I could see things like; who was using up all the bandwidth on the network by correctly reading the graphs and analyzing the source and destination and ports. So when working on the NOC and a ticket come in where a client is having slow internet access I was pretty confident on how to troubleshoot this. 9 times out of 10 it was a user doing a large download saturating the WAN link or a online backup job failed and started to run during the day. But you get the joy when you can point out the naughty user when the IT contact or manager calls up complaining about the internet