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Switchport mode Access/Trunk vs. General?
We're moving more workloads to the M4300 series of switches and wanted to revisit some conventions in our internal documentation. In the early days you could only use what is now named "General" ...
msi,
I inquired your concern to the higher tier of NETGEAR Support and got their feedback. According to them, General Mode is not legacy. It is just a different way of doing the configuration. Access Mode and Trunk Mode were added for those who were more familiar with Cisco and wished to configure it that way. They both will achieve the same results if you configure them correctly.
Regards,
DaneA
NETGEAR Community Team
I'd be interested in hearing from the Netgear crew if possible since I've come the the (interim) conclusion that in general mode especially trunks end up to longer configs. For example:
configure interface interface X/X/X vlan ingressfilter vlan participation exclude 1 vlan participation include 200-205 vlan tagging 200-205 exit configure interface interface X/X/X switchport mode trunk switchport trunk allowed vlan 200-205 exit
The additional lines in general mode is due to the fact that ingressfilter is automatically enabled trunk mode and any that general mode always includes the default VLAN and that it has to be explicitely excluded - which doesn't seem the case in trunk (and in access mode)
switchport mode access also seems to end up with shorter configs to:
configure interface X/X/X vlan pvid 200 vlan ingressfilter vlan participation exclude 1 vlan participation include 200 exit configure interface X/X/X switchport mode access switchport access vlan 200 exit
Of course the actual configs end up being larger since in my case I do set 'vlan acceptframe' and other things.
Still: If you save 2-3 lines per port config, this starts to add up in complete config file on a stack of switches, hence my initial question if there is an actual recommendation from Netgear's side.
msi,
I inquired your concern to the higher tier of NETGEAR Support and got their feedback. According to them, General Mode is not legacy. It is just a different way of doing the configuration. Access Mode and Trunk Mode were added for those who were more familiar with Cisco and wished to configure it that way. They both will achieve the same results if you configure them correctly.
Regards,
DaneA
NETGEAR Community Team
Hi DaneA
Thanks for taking the time to check this internally, good to hear that both ways are still valid.
What makes general mode more verbose (hence harder to read) is that I have to enable ingress filtering explicitely if I want it (which I do prefer to be enabled), and the fact that VLAN 1 (as far as I understood) has to explicitely excluded if not used. I'm not specifically coming from a Cisco background, but these are some of the reasons as to why my personal preference goes to switchport mode access/trunk - as of now.
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