Cat 500 Express switch

[p.holley]

I have heared complaints about the Cisco Cat 500 switch.

When using the Cat 500 with AP1200 and 7920 IP phones, the phones do not roam from AP to AP.

Also I have found out that the Cat 500 will not relay dhcp request to a server on a seperate vlan from it's configured ip address.

With CLI switches, the "ip helper-address under the vlan will acheive this. With the Cat 500, how do u acheive directed broadcast.

Looks like this switch is not very good. The smartports do not work very well, you will find that choosing "other" as a smartport fixes most connectivity issues.

Cisco your comments?

[p.holley]

So i tried "other" as a smartport option for the workstations and they were able to get dhcp address from the server on a seperate vlan from the switch.

But that is a problem for my ip phones, as they will not work whith this configuration on the ports. I will have to use a seperate connection for the ip phones to work.More cabling you might say.

Anyone out there worked with this useless switch ;)

[ttrentler]

I'm not a big Fan of this switch either. Looks like a layer 2 switch without any QOS features. If I'm lookinkg for a low cost POE switch with layer three functionality why would I not use a netgear switch instead?

I hate that the 3560's cost so much as these switches seem to work better.

[rhugo]

We used these switches on a small CCM deploy. I think they are COMPLETE JUNK! I can't understand why Cisco would market this switch for VOIP installs!! In addition, I think it is bad practice to have a network switch that you CAN'T telnet to, can't console to, and is ONLY accessible from a WEB BROWSER??? ABSURD!!!