Cisco Catalyst 3550 & 2950 VLAN setup

[mdanalis]

Hi !

I am currently managing the IT of a Hotel that uses Cisco 2950 switches and a backbone Cisco Catalyst 3550 to provide wired Internet to Guest Rooms.

Each Guest room uses one port of the Cisco 2950 switch and it is set up as a VLAN (for example room 101 is VLAN 101) to enable a Nomadix USG (it is a Gateway that provides bandwidth management and billing for internet usage based on VLANS) to charge for internet usage.

Recently the hotel changed it's policy and it is not longer charging for Internet.

Furthermore, the Nomadix gateway ceased to work and it was removed from the network.

So now the problem is that the Network Infrastructure has switches set up in VLANs and the Router (a Zyxel ZyWall 35) does not support VLAN tagging.

Therefore, if I remove the VLAN setup from the Cisco switches will the Router (no-VLAN support) be able to provide Internet to hotel rooms ???

I have access through the Java console and I can change the attributes of each port.

I see that most ports have the VLAN that corresponds to the room, some offices use VLAN 2 and the uplinks are all TRUNK (I think default VLAN 1)...

What should all ports be in order to work with a non-VLAN tagging router ???

VLAN 1, VLAN 2 or Trunk ???

Thanks for your help !!!

MD

[Reza Sharifi]

Hi,

If the router doesnt support vlan tagging than just change all the switch vlans to vlan 1 (default vlan) and so you only have one vlan which connected to the router untagged.

HTH

[mdanalis]

Thanks for your reply !

Just to check that I have the correct setup :

Administrative Mode should be Static Access / Dynamic Access / Trunk Desirable OR Trunk Auto ??

Administrative Encapsulation ??

Static Access VLAN (1-1005) :  1 (based on your suggestion)

Trunk Allowed VLANs (all, 1-1005) : ALL

Pruning VLANs (none, 2-1001) : 2-1001

Native VLAN : 1

Can you help me with the configuration ?

Thanks again !

[devils_advocate]

You have a couple of options really.

You could either change all ports to be in the same Vlan or I believe the 3550 is capable of intervlan routing.

If each hotel room is on a seperate Vlan, presumably they all have a default gateway somewhere?

You 'could' create those default gateways on the 3550 as Vlan interfaces, i.e Interface Vlan101 would be the default gateway for vlan 101. You could then setup a default route on the 3550 to point to the router.

If the 3550 is doing the intervlan routing, the router itself doesn't need to be capable of Vlan tagging as you simply have a default route to it for packets that are destined for an internet address.

[mdanalis]

Thanks for your help !!

I already set up the Cisco 3550 ports & the Cisco 2950 ports (they are all in a cluster so it's easy to manage from java browser) to be "Static Access" and VLAN 1.

The Router now "sees" all Guest rooms and assigns them IP address through DHCP !!

Everyone is happy !

Missioned accomplished !

Thanks to all !