Cisco Basics for an easy answer

[Rory Hamaker]

Guys, i am lots of things, but a Cisco expert is certainly not one of them.  I configure enterprise switches at work (poorly) but need to translate a little of that to my house.  I have a run of the mill modem/4 port switch to get out with, and a 3560x 8 port POE switch for other equipment.  My question is is there any good recommendations for port configuration on this guy.  I am using it for your typical home use stuff, streaming media, i have a small vmware deployment for testing linked desktop clones, and surfing.  

I currently have all the access ports on a vlan (not default, i have had security beaten into me), and the port that goes back up to the modem/router/switch set as a trunk port.  The access ports are setup as 

Switchport mode access

Switchport access vlan 60

spanning-tree portfast

and that is the only config on the switch and ports.  I have pretty good internet service, 180mb down, and when i have one device streaming media the net just grinds down to a halt on anything else.  It is most likely an ISP thing, but i want to have my ducks in a row on my end before i go round with the ISP.  

As always, any help is appreciated.

[Dennis Mink]

My advise; keep it simple. sure you can turn all the nerd buttons on, but is it actually gonna improve anything. One thing you need to ask is "what problem am I trying to solve".  

In general, for home use/SOHO I would suggest a single VLAN and subnet.you could have two subnets on your netwrok if you wanted to shield one off from the other from a security perspective, but that would be as far as I would go.

Re. your streaming, it would be interesting to see how much bandwidth the streaming is trying to grab. because of TCP/IP's inherent bandwidth hungry nature, one machine could push away all other traffic if no bandwidth policing is being done on the edge of your network (i.e. internet router). So I would look into what bandwidth it is consuming when your internet 'comes to a halt'.

just some thoughts

[Rory Hamaker]

Dennis, thank you for the reply, and you are just confirming what i was already thinking.  I do have all of the ports in a single VLAN now for simplicity and i don't even need to subnet them off for any reason.  Do you even recommend me using the trunk feature on my uplink back to the router, or is that just overkill too?  Since i am not doing any pruning on the VLANs i wasn't sure if it was even necessary.  

That brings me to the next thing i need to look at, my router.  It is just a cheap-y best buy special all in one job that works well but doesn't have any real configureable options.  As far as grabbing bandwidth usage, Wireshark???

[Dennis Mink]

theoretically, if you run one vlan in your network, there really isnt a need for a trunk, sure you can run a trunk, but it will only encapsulate the one vlan that you have.

bandwidth usage, not sure how good your home router is and see what bandwidth usage it has on its port to the internet, otherwise you could check the port on the switch to which the internet router is connected. its in/out Kbps should reflect (more or less) what goes up and down to and from the internet.  if you want to capture that using wireshark, you can span the internet router port to another port on your 3560 and connect the wireshark client to it. wireshark allows you do do some stats on the overall traffic it captured.