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Forum Discussion
Advice on managing old GS108PEv2 and GS108Ev3 switches?
My homelab is populated with much older 2nd hand Netgear ProSAFE switches, specifically 2 GS108PEv2 and 3 GS108Ev3. My understanding is that these need to be managed with the ProSafe Plus Utility, which I have. I am a full Linux user, but this has worked in the past with the utility installed via wine on a laptop plugged straight into the switch. I have the switches populated all over my house and configured, and they're working well. I want to be able to manage them going forward, but I'm having trouble coming up with a way to do this. The management IP of all the switches is on the 1 VLAN in the house. I have a VM in my proxmox environment with a nic configured on the 1 VLAN, and an IP on that network, with static routes (which have been confirmed with "ip route get 10.1.1.*" (for each switch). I can also ping them all successfully.
When I load up the utility, I get "No switch exists in the local area network!" This is obviously not a typical setup, but I'm wondering if there are any obvious tricks I'm missing (firewall, something on my L3 switch, etc) that would allow ping but prevent the Prosafe Plus utility from talking to the switches?
BTW I know these need to be replaced eventually but I'm doing one thing at a time, and they work...I just don't want to have to bring a laptop all over the house and leave a port configured on VLAN 1 all the time if I need to work on them. Any help is appreciated!
3 Replies
One additional note; even though I can ping I show 0 open ports with an "nmap -e ens19 -p- 10.1.1.32" (ens19 being the interface on that VLAN)
The simple IP stack implemented on a basic uController (8051-style) Plus switch can never recognize VLAN tags flowing to the switch over a tagged connection - neither for the management, nor for the pure discovery. That's the way it is. To get the discovery and where available (on the GS108Ev3) the simple WebUI and the discovery (GS108PEv2) is reachable when using untagged frames only - this is the cost we pay for an unmanaged core switch at the price tag of an unmanaged switch with select config capabilities only.
The only trick required is to operate the management network and IP subnet untagged.
Understood, that makes sense. I had a colleague suggest there may be something to do with multicast routing, but that's way over my head. Thanks!
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