Limits on Cisco Business Smart switches

[marianarlt]

I recently bought a CBS220-16P-2G switch. After setting basic stuff up I noticed that quite a lot of pretty standard IOS commands would be missing. I guess this is one of Cisco's marketing strategies?

I especially noticed the lack of being able to configure the SSH server with public key authentication and no way of setting up proper self signed certificates for the HTTPS server. Am I missing something here?

I checked Data Sheet, Documentation, GUI and CLI and it looks like this functionality is not implemented. Searched the interwebs a bit also, which leads me to think this is indeed the case. Can somebody confirm or educate me on how to do this on these devices?

Example of available SSH options:

CBS220(config)#ip ssh
  password-auth  Enable SSH style password authentication
  server         Enable the device to be configured from SSH.

Version: 

CBS220#show version
Cisco CBS220 Series Switch Software, Version 2.0.2.14, RELEASE SOFTWARE
Copyright (c) 2024 by Cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled Mar 20 2024 - 15:49:00

[Flavio Miranda]

@marianarlt 

 It seems you did your home work properly and in fact those device does not support all of that. We tend to think any cisco device as equals but those CBS devices meant to compete with brants like d-link, tp-link etc. They dont follow the same standard for cisco corp gears.

[balaji.bandi]

This is not IOS, this is firmware used on the CBS Switches, that is limited unlike enterpise IOS have different command lines functionality, that is the reason costing too different.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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@marianarlt wrote:

I recently bought a CBS220-16P-2G switch. After setting basic stuff up I noticed that quite a lot of pretty standard IOS commands would be missing. I guess this is one of Cisco's marketing strategies?  

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Possibly not the only reason, but likely a large component of the decision.

The product is aimed at the SMB market, so demand for advanced features, probably not as much as in larger Enterprises.

Less features also means, often, need for less hardware resources.

Also, vendors don't like to compete against themselves.  If the features of a SMB switch were 90% of the Enterprise switch, but say 25% of the price, possibly it would cannibalize sales on the much more profitable switch.