Friday, April 10, 2020

FASTPATH-based switches: switchport mode general vs. access/trunk?

Hi

Being mostly a systems engineer these days I also have to tend to some networking in our school here and I've been working with a couple of FASTPATH-based switches from Netgear, Ubiquiti and Dell lately and int the past.

From time to time I'm trying to revisit old habits in order to check if I an initial choice was good or not if time allows. I'm trying to decide whether switchport mode general vs. switchport mode access/trunk are wiser to use or if it's just a matter of personal taste. :-)

Most of these FASTPATH-based switches tend to use "switchport mode general" by default where VLAN partiticipation, tagging and PVID has to be defined (also ingress filtering often is not enabled by default). Based on checking with older models of those vendors, general mode used to be the only available mode in FASTPATH. Access/trunk modes have their origins in IOS and were added by Broadcom a couple of years ago and now exist alongside seemingly without an intend to drop one or another config mode.

I've compared a port config of an access port when in general vs. access mode as well as general vs. trunk mode. The port configs tend to be a bit shorter and (by my personal taste) less clunky than in general mode. (roughly 2 lines per port)

Of course mixing both general vs. access/trunk usage is likely unwise as it might rather lead to confusion... but any preferences from day-to-day experiences?



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