CiscoSG300-10 10-Port Gigabit Switch (SRW2008-K9-NA)

Cisco is well known for Enterprise networking, and I was keen to see how well these switches performed against my expectations. I'm a highly technical home user. You won't need a bunch of this functionality at home unless you really know what you're up to, and why you'd want to do it.The feature set is amazing. You get big brand complex features, right out of the box. You've found a switch that genuinely appears to do everything you could need, from VLANs to Link Aggregation, from MAC and 802.1x filtering, to provider edge port isolation. There's fully configurable Logging, QoS, management, IPv6 and many many more that I'm not personally using. Hmm, I should also mention that the full online HTML help inside the UI is a great addition to people doing config with these devices for the first time.Management and Configuration is smooth and painless through either the GUI or via the CLI on the recent firmware upgrades. Those familiar with IOS will find things that are familiar in the CLI, as well as frustrations when things aren't quite IOS. Better still, this device has all the same configuration options and features as the larger 24 port and 48 port devices, with slightly scaled limits. That means it can be an integral, fully functional part of the network where you need only a small number of ports, and can even be link-aggregated back to a core, optionally with fiber modules.This for me was a great "behind the TV" switch, LAG'd to my main Cisco 300-52. That gave me 8 ports of GigE where the builder of my house had only installed two Cat5e drops. The ability to use VLANs keeps all my VoIP traffic from the Polycom voice over ip phones off the rest of the network. I have QoS configured for the game consoles, and even have guest internet access running with the provider edge function (port protection) back to my Sonicwall and out to the Internet.There is great consistency between the 300 series and the 200 series devices, so in a mixed network, administration should be fairly simple.Cisco have already put out a couple of firmware upgrades for this device, and unlike the Enterprise class products, you don't need a support contract to download them. Simply register a CCO account, and the small business site will let you download the upgrades for free.This switch has generally been very stable, with no need to reboot for months of runtime.I have seven variants of this device in my network. No issues with any of them. A solid purchase. I'm using several VLANs, most of the QoS features and a lot of the security features. My home network supports both a corporate network over a VPN link and my home devices, as well as a guest WiFi Hotspot for frequent visitors. Couldn't have made it all work without these switches and the Cisco 1142 AP's.Happy Networking !

I work on million dollar+ advanced versions of cisco/juniper/brocade network devices so I'm overqualified to use this device. Please listen to my advice before you buy this device after I spent 1 hour working on this device and ended up returning. I get it, it's not a super expensive version but when you advertise layer 3 capable and do not support the basic functions that 95% of the small/medium business or home users expect, it's false advertising. My intent was to get lower latency times at my home network as my primary wifi router, netgear, sucks. Yes, I use the cheap consumer stuff at home but I wanted to step it up a bit as some of cisco's SG series stuff is good for managed switching.DO NOT PURCHASE THIS DEVICE FOR LAYER 3 FUNCTION UNLESS YOU ARE AWARE AND UNDERSTAND THE FOLLOWING:-device does NOT support NAT, this means your internal devices are REQUIRED to have PUBLIC IPs if you want to be able to access anything on the internet. Most normal people do not have public IPs at home except 1 for their router and they NAT everything else. This does support ACLs, so if you have ALL PUBLIC IPs this would work ok.-Assuming your understood the above, in layer3 mode, be aware this device's DHCP implementation is terrible. The expectation of the software for this device is that your uplink/carrier port, the port you connect to your provider, MUST be in vlan 1 only and no other vlan, if you understand this, go to the next step-You can NOT turn on DHCPD on one vlan (say, for your internal network) and have the client running on the other vlan to get an IP from your provider. This means even if you buy this router and accept all the above and you do not have a static IP with your provider, you can NOT run the DHCPD function on this router (no idea WHY, but it specifically says this in the user manual. It also spits out an error if you try to do this.-The DHCP client implementation on vlan 1 that connects to your provider is not good, I could never get it to pull an IP except 1 time-The cli IOS implementation is kinda cool, but also buggy (even with the latest code). The IOS implementation will accept some commands even if syntax is wrong or do not exist. Normal IOS will typical alert you to invalid syntax, this does not. This drove me a bit nutty.As an expert with network devices, even at this price point, it is only layer 2 capable, not layer 3. I didn't expect perfection but DHCPD/DHCP + NAT/PAT support is required by 99% of business so not having that support this device is useless for most people.

I have just received it and started some configuration and testing with it. just a few things that are odd to me, configuring a user account and a management configuration, you also have to make sure you go to the security and enable those modes before you configure them otherwise you could lock yourself out of the device. and if you are like me without a F-M connector for serial, you may have issues using the serial console cable. so i had to reset it after that little mishap.the biggest problem i had is that i was planning on using this for my home network edge device with one port connected to my cable modem with the "ip dhcp" configuration and then running NAT+PAT and then configuring vlans/ports for my wireless. this device will not work as an edge device as it does not support NAT. without NAT you dont get PAT, which prevents this device from being used as an edge device. if you get this device, you will still need a $35-45 home router to provide NAT+PAT, and then your separate wireless routers for a well secured home network. also the last thing of note is that there appears to be a maximum number of 128 TCAM entries which is 1 TCAM entry per interface which includes port and vlan interfaces and each ACL entry is a TCAM entry. so with a well used device you can figure on only having a maximum of 100-110 total ACL entries.1) no NAT+PAT2) small TCAM means not a lot of room for ACLsyes, it is labeled as a switch, but with all the other features such as TACACS, RADIUS, NTP, 802.1x, VLANs with Layer 3 Interfaces, ACLs, and a whole host of other features, it seems odd that they would leave out the only option to configure and use it as an Edge Device.