Question Regarding Management Ports

[oahenkepi]

I purchased a refurbished WS-C3750E-48PD 48 port PoE gigabit switch for $170 with a 1 year warranty. It has the latest IOS version of 12.2(55)SE12 running image C3759-UNIVERSALK9-M.

When I first got it and fired it up with a console cable attached it started the new switch setup in cli. Now this thing is Stack Aware and really built for that but I will only be using it as a single switch attached to a Firewalla Gold and some Netgear Nighthawk APs. One is an old router and I know it has a VLAN mode. My main use case is going to be segmenting my IoT network and Camera network to separate VLANs than my priority network. Just wanted to make everything clear before I go into my question and what I’m wanting to do.

Now In the cli setup Wizard it asks what interface you want to use as a management interface. Since it has a 10/100 Management interface on the back next to the console port, I just naturally selected that port. But I got to thinking that I’m not going to be building a separate management network. And I don’t want to plug that into a gigabit interface and create a loop. So would it be better to reconfigure the management interface to be one of the front gigabit ports, that way I can access it from my main network for management? The main reason I don’t want to use the one on the back is that it’s 10/100 and I’d like to not have anything slower than gigabit in the setup. So if it would be best to change the management interface to say gigabit Ethernet port 1 and then just not have anything plugged in there? In the past when I was configuring Cisco switches they were always in a stack and the smaller client end switches were managed based on that subnet block.

I feel like I’m over complicating things but I just want to be able to manage the switch from the primary network either by ssh or web interface. Still trying to find my copy of Cisco Network Assistant and use it to setup LACP and such since it’s just easier. Thanks in advance and SSL.

[Georg Pauwen]

Hello,

the main 'drawback' of the management interface is that traffic cannot be routed between the management interface and other interfaces. So if you have enough ports available, using a different port is definitely an option. Either make the port you want to use as a routed port, or assign a (management) Vlan to the port and configure a Vlan interface (SVI), which then can be accessed through SSH or the web interface.

I have a feeling that you are going to use this for a home network and not in a business environment ?