Managed and Unmanaged Switches ??

[helal_ibrahim]

I am looking for some useful technical information regarding Managed and Unmanaged  switches and their connection.

1)      If an unmanaged CISCO switch is in between a managed CISCO switch and a device I want to monitor (by the managed switch) is the managed switch still capable of monitoring that device?.

2)      If my network consists of several managed switches (CISCO and other vendors) does the SNMP software of CISCO monitor all these switches if they support SNMP?.

Thanks for your concern

Eng. Helal Ibrahim

[jimmysands73_2 · Accepted solution]

No, a unmanged switch will not let you pass vlan traffic correctly among other things.  So in our case one time in the field it was dropping tagged (management) packets, not dropping untagged (user) traffic, problem was a unmanged switch in the middle of configuirations.  If you have no vlans (gasp!) it will work, otherwise, will not.

I searched google for managed unmanaged switch vlan and got good info.

Here are two great aritcles:

http://www.webjunction.org/advanced-networking/articles/content/432124

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/switches/networking_solutions_products_genericcontent0900aecd806c7afe.pdf

2)  No idea, I would hope though a monitoring program would monitor any vendors equipement.

[helal_ibrahim]

Thanks you very much sir, i'll be reading the material you gave me links to ... and any futher information regarding SNMP question i would be very greatful .... are there unmanaged routers and managed routers ?? if so is our small home router a managed or semi managed or unmanaged route ?? ... thank you very much for your concern