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July 13, 2010
Cisco Catalyst 2900XL Switches
I was tired of never having enough ports on my hubs, routers, and switches, so I picked up four of these Cisco Catalyst 2900XL Switches. (Technically, they are the WS-C2924M-XL-EN model.) And, now that I'm looking at them, I have no idea how they work. Wow. Not exactly plug-and-play I don't think.
These things have "24 fixed autosensing 10/100 ports".
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst2900xl_3500xl/releasesa4/icg/maoverv.pdf
SYSTEM LED - "The system LED shows whether the system is receiving power and functioning properly. Green = System is operating normally."
Hmmm. So far, the System LED is green. So far, so good.
RPS LED - "The redundant power system (RPS) LED shows the RPS status.
Off RPS is off or is not installed."
So, no RPS LED. Not a big deal. I'm not clear I need a redundant power supply at this point.
Port Mode and Port Status LEDs
Use the Mode button to change the meanings of the LEDs above each port. There are four
possible modes:STAT The port status. This is the default mode.
UTL The current bandwidth in use by the switch.
FDUP The port duplex mode: full duplex or half duplex.
100 The port operating speed: 10 or 100 Mbps.Changing the Port Mode
To change the port mode, press the Mode button (see Figure 1-6) to highlight in sequence
each of the possibilities. Release the button to enable the lit function.
Hmmm. Right now, the only Port Mode LED lit up is the STAT light. Hmmm.
OK. So, pushing the MODE button makes it change from STAT to UTL to FDUP to 100.
For STAT, FDUP, and 100, none of my 1X - 24X port lights are lit up.
For UTL, the 1X port lights up green.
I should mention that this switch has a large sticker on the front that says "10.251.1.5", which makes me think I'm going to have to change the switch's static IP address at some point.
There is an RJ-45 Console Port on the back of this thing. Hmmm.
I finally took a Cat-5 ethernet cable and just plugged it into the 1X port on the thing. At first, the 1X light turned orange. But now, it's green. It blinks occasionally. Interesting.
Actually, I have two lights that aren't described in this manual. They are above the STAT/UTL/FDUP/100 lights. They're labeled "1" and "2". At first, when I turned it on, the "1" LED was lit up green. Then, after a bit, it went off, and the "2" LED lit up green. Why? Dunno. No clue.
Then, I took another Cat-5 ethernet cable - the one that runs upstairs to my bedroom and plugged it into 2X, and at first, it didn't light up because I didn't have the laptop upstairs powered up. But I went upstairs and turned off the wireless card on the laptop and hooked up my ethernet Cat-5 and then booted up the laptop and was able to surf the internet.
I went back downstairs and looked at the switch and I see that 1X and 2X are both blinking green. So, I was worried I was going to have to reconfigure the switch, but it looks like it's working fine to me. Woohoo!
Posted by Rob Kiser on July 13, 2010 at 11:43 PM
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