I have a few Netgear GS108Ev3 switch connected together with tagged ports.
1) Is it ok to turn off VLAN 1 on all the ports and untag the VLANs I want to come thru on each port?
2) Can I connect a Cisco switch to the GS108Ev3 on a port where all the VLANs are set to tagged? Passing all the VLANs to a trunk port on the Cisco? Do I have to have VLAN 1 active for this to work?
Model: GS108Ev3|ProSafe 8 ports Gigabit Plus switch
Half of it. Netgear has some design allowing the config of asymmetrical VLANs (breaking the 802.1q common understandings). There are two controls affected: The setting of the port to (one on the 802.1q context!) [U]natagged VLAN participation defining which VLAN frames are flowing out of the switch untaggged, and the PIVD which does define the VLAN untagged incoming frames to the switch will be assigned to.
Appears you hang on with the decades old (Cisco!) problem (read implementaion issue and old old switch hardware limitation) for not using native VLAN1 which is still often mentioned as best policy all over the the net. It happened back then that the native VLAN 1 was leaking over different other VLANs. Later on, bad guys could use a untagged port to inject tagged frames...
1) My understanding is the native Vlan must match on both sides of the trunk of it to work.
Best policy of course, to avoid errors and confusion. Technically you can run the VLAN AB on one switch, expose this as an untagged/PVID (native if you want) on port, and on the adjacent switch you can bring these frames to VLAN XY, by configuring the link port to use the VLAN AB untagged, and PVID AB. The untagged frames don't indicate any VLAN. This is sometimes done when merging businesses and networks FWIW. On the other end of the switch feature scale, there is even VLAN translation available.
