Cisco 877 and Vlans :)

[GuyCisco]

Good Day Everyone

We are building a network on a budget and managed to get 3 Cisco 877 ADSL routers for 50 bucks a piece. What a bargain!

I have a little question though. 

According to the documentation on these routers they "Should Support"up to 4 VLANs. Which is fine, you can add a network on each LAN port. This way you can work around not being able to assign virtual interfaces or being able to assign ip addresses to each individual port.

All 3 of my bargain/bin Cisco 877 routers though seem to be limited to only the default + 1 additional VLAN... Bummer seems like these are meant for REALLY small SOHO networks... 

Is there a way i can work around this limitation?

Or is there a specific version of IOS i need to load to support up to 4 VLANs?

The memory on all 3 routers seems to be limited to files up to 21mb so so the highest version of IOS I have been able to go was 12.4.24 Advanced IP Services or 15.1.4 advanced security. Currently running 12.4.24 AIS.

Kind Regards

Willie Pretorius

[Georg Pauwen]

Hello,

in case you don't succeed in creating more than two VLANs, if your goal is to have more address space, an alternative would be to use secondary IP addresses on the VLAN interfaces. You can create a DHCP pool that dishes out IP addresses for these secondary subnets. Here is a sample config just in case:

ip dhcp pool VLAN10

network 192.168.10.0 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.12.0 255.255.255.0 secondary
override default-router 192.168.12.1
override utilization low 1
default-router 192.168.10.1
dns-server 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4
domain-name xxxx.xx.xx
lease 0 0 10
update arp
!
interface Vlan10
ip address 192.168.10.1 255.255.255.0
ip address 192.168.12.1 255.255.255.0 secondary

[GuyCisco]

Actually setting up a secondary interface with a lower cost route for redundancy and a lan range on each router.

Sorry for the diagram...

[GuyCisco]

If anyone else finds themselves unable to create vlans after upgrading their firmware on a cisco 877. There is a handy post here from pkhatri  giving all the IOS versions supporting vlans.

[GuyCisco]

Good Evening

I thank everyone of their support.

I just found an IOS version that is working for me. I have to create my vlan's from the vlan database command and not from configure terminal. Thank you for the tip Georg Pauwen.

And thank you Leo Laohoo im sure IOS 123.8 advanced ip services would have worked for me but i was still trying to create my vlans from configure terminal and the command was completely missing.

ParticlePhysics_R1(vlan)#vlan 989
Vlan can not be added. Maximum number of 10 vlan(s) in the database.

ParticlePhysics_R1(vlan)#exit
APPLY completed.
Exiting....
ParticlePhysics_R1#sh flash:
24576K bytes of processor board System flash (Intel Strataflash)

Directory of flash:/

2 -rwx 13551508 Mar 01 2002 05:12:38 +00:00 c870-advipservicesk9-mz.124-2.t.bin
3 -rwx 1140 Mar 01 2002 05:44:00 +00:00 vlan.dat

23482368 bytes total (9926656 bytes free)
ParticlePhysics_R1#

I have to be hounest guys i lied a bit to make my query sound a bit more important. I'm not building a budget network, I recently started studying for my CCNA studies and purchased these Cisco 877 routers to practice on.

However this has been a huge learning curve and i must have reinstalled ios 5 or 7 times from rommon as well as 10 or 12 times from ios with a tftp server.

I dont know who to award the best solution to it was a team effort.

O and Georg Pauwen i will keep you method to add secondary ip ranges to interfaces as a trick up my sleeve in the future. I'm sure i would have gotten my network to function if i didn't have issues with the routing table not showing the primary or secondary ip range once i configure both. Im sure like with most things on these 877's its all up to the IOS you use and the bugs that have been patched.

Kind Regards
Willie