PowerConnect 2708 trunking with PIX

Hi,


I am afraid the 27xx series switches do not support trunking.


Regards

I was afraid of that. Another guy here bought the switch. I guess he wasn't really knowing what he was looking at.  What model do you suggest for trunking? This will simply be used to isolate our data/voice traffic at a new branch office we are building. The switch will need to trunk to a Cisco PIX that VPNs back to HQ.

Actually you can setup VLAN trunking by just properly configuring the 2708 VLAN from the web page.  Let's define what VLAN trunking means (I'm assuming you are referring to VLAN trunking).

VLAN trunking as defined by dot1q is a VLAN port connecting two switches with the following characteristics:

• Accept only tagged traffic on the member VLAN(s).
• Will not accept untagged traffic.
• Will only egress tagged traffic from the VLAN(s) to which the port is a member.

So you can configure these modes easily enough on the 2708.

• On the VLAN membership page.  Add the port you want to be the trunking port to the VLANs to which you want to trunk.  Make sure you add these VLANs as "T" (tagged).  This configuration tell the switch to accept tagged packet for the given VLAN(s) and to send out tagged packets on the VLAN(s)
• On the VLAN port settings page.  Select the trunk port.  Set the "Frame type" to "Admit Tagged Only".  You can set the PVID to 4095 (discard VLAN) too but it doesn't matter since the "Admit Tagged Only" filter already prevent the port from receiving untagged frame.  This tell the switch to only accept tagged packets so untagged packets will be discarded.
• Make sure ingress filtering is enabled.  This tells the switch to only accept packets to which the port is also a member.

Once you configure it this way you see that you met all the criterias of a VLAN trunk.  I believe that this should work.

Cuong.

I'm trying to "trunk" vlans 5 and 10 from a 3324 ("real" manageable switch) to a 2716, and even when following these last instructions, it just doesn't work.

I've already trunked those two vlans on another port of the 3324 to a 5324, and it works fine. Configuring another port of the 3324 in the same way as the already working port, then configuring the 2716 as explained above simply doesn't work.

The web-only management (which works horribly bad with firefox and plain bad with mozilla) and the fact that apparently the switch can only be managed through vlan 1 doesn't make testing configurations very easy. The "Addendum" to the 27xx documentation where vlans are vaguely mentionned is really too sparse and doesn't actually explain anything at all.

I thought the 27xx were going to be sufficient for my basic needs, which are just trunking two vlans on the uplink port, then assiging either of the two vlans to all of the other ports depending on what they'll be used for, but it seems that I was wrong.

Has anyone managed to ever get vlans trunked to some 27xx device? Cuong : Have you actually tried this? I'm really curious, because I've been fighting with the 2716 for the last hours, and it just doesn't work, and is impossible to debug.

Matthias