poe, active ports, best practices

[dmoran2008]

I have a series of 2950,2960 & 3560 switches on my network and I am wanting to fine tune the settings on these switches.

We are not running any POE instruments on any of the switches in question.

So I am trying to have the switches setup in the most efficient manner, sooooooooo

1) I am guessing POE should be disabled.

2) Would disabling unused ports help performance in any way?

3) How often should these items be restarted and does restarting help performance at all?

Any additional tips, tricks or thoughts are greatly appreciated.

I thank you all in advance.

Dan

[Jon Marshall]

dmoran2008 wrote:
I have a series of 2950,2960 & 3560 switches on my network and I am wanting to fine tune the settings on these switches.
We are not running any POE instruments on any of the switches in question.
So I am trying to have the switches setup in the most efficient manner, sooooooooo
1) I am guessing POE should be disabled.
2) Would disabling unused ports help performance in any way?
3) How often should these items be restarted and does restarting help performance at all?
Any additional tips, tricks or thoughts are greatly appreciated.
I thank you all in advance.
Dan

Dan

There are many things you should do but the basics -

1) create vlan on the switch(es) eg vlan 998. Do not create a L3 SVI for this vlan ie. this vlan does not need to be routed. Put all the unused ports into this vlan. Reasoning is by default all ports are in vlan 1 and you don't want this.

2) don't use vlan 1 if you can help it for anything ie. user ports or to manage the switches.

3) Have a dedicated vlan for the management of the switches ie. don't allocate any user ports into this vlan

4) create another unused vlan eg. vlan 99 and use this as the native vlan

5) if they are working fine don't restart them, if they are running well leave them alone.

Jon

[Leo Laohoo]

1) I am guessing POE should be disabled.

You can't disable PoE if you don't have PoE switches (like the 2950, for instance).  To know if your switch supports PoE, use the command "sh power inline".  To disable PoE on an interface, use the command "power inline never".

2) Would disabling unused ports help performance in any way?

Depends on who's "performance" you are talking about?  The switch?  No.  The network administrator?  Not-a-snowball's-chance-in-he77.  Imagine this:  So you disabled all unused ports, so far so good.  Then some poor bloke will be getting calls, continuously, to enable the ports.  Next you have to find a way to determine if the un-used ports should be disabled or the remote end is not connected because they are either sick, on leave, training, or died on the spot.  On paper it sounds good if you have a very sensitive network, like defense.  I've done this before and, trust me when I say, but this is a sure-fire way to make more enemies than friends in a workplace.

2) Would disabling unused ports help performance in any way?

I love upgrading IOS on switches (including APs) and routers (including bootstrap) whenever a new release is cleared.  I upgrade as often as possible.  So far, so good. 

Here are my tips:

1.  Never, EVER, use VLAN 1 to push traffic.  Always disable VLAN 1.  The use of VLAN 1 in any network (prod, dev, test, joke) is a sign of a bad network administrator.  Period.

2.  Clean up your patching.

3.  Listen to your colleagues and, most of all, listen to the clients.  If clients, for example, say they would like to know if you can have wireless don't immediately say no.  Because countless documentations have proven that if the organization won't, then staff will find a way (in most case un-authorized) to get what they deem to help their daily work.

4.  When troubleshooting, it helps when you brainstorm.  During brainstorming, don't immediately discard "insane" suggestion.  You have no idea how many times we solved network faults using "insane" suggestion.

5.  When you configure network equipments, it helps if you know what each line of commands meant.  Don't be a so-called "trained monkey" (aka and-the-monkey-throws-the-switch) and cut-n-paste.  Know them and understand them.

Yabba-da-yabba-da-that's-all-folks!