Non Cisco Switches

[Muhammad Haseeb]

Dear ALL,

I am an IT Potfessional, Doing Network + . I have a questions:

1) Do Non Cisco Switches have Access and Trunk ports. What i mean is do non cisco switches distinguish between ethernet prots as trunk and access.

2) Do we need Cross talk cable for Connectine two non cisco switches preferably D-Link . Also How to interconnect a Cisco switch wioth non cisco switch.

Regards

Haseeb

[daniel.dib]

1) Yes, any decent switch will have support for 802.1Q which is the standard for tagging frames. Note that the terminology can be a bit different. With HP, a trunk is what Cisco calls an Etherchannel, the bundling of multiple ports. With HP you don't configure ports as access or trunk. You configure under the VLAN which ports should be untagged and tagged.

2) I think you mean a crossover cable. It is not generally needed since all devices today use MDI-X which can reverse the transmit/receive pars in the Ethernet cable. I still like to use the proper cables though. This has nothing to do with the vendor though, Cisco to Cisco would be the same.

Daniel Dib
CCIE #37149

Please rate helpful posts.

[Leo Laohoo]

2) Do we need Cross talk cable for Connectine two non cisco switches preferably D-Link . Also How to interconnect a Cisco switch wioth non cisco switch.

All Cisco swtiches will, by DEFAULT, support MDI/MDI-X.  However, if you hard-code either the speed and/or duplex settings of a port, you will disable MDI/MDI-X.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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Posting

As Daniel noted "decent" switches, i.e. manageable and supporting VLANs, will generally support VLAN tagging ports using the 801.2q standard.  (NB: this standard allows VLAN tagging between different vendors.)  Switches that support VLANs will distinguish between untagged (edge) ports (e.g. Cisco access) and the tagged ports (e.g. a Cisco trunk), but as Daniel also noted, their terminology might be different.

As Leo noted, many switches offer auto MDI/MDI-X.  Surprisingly, this feature was often seen on unmanageable switches before it was seen on manageable switches.  Also on older unmanageable switches, you might find a pair of physical ports that are the same logical port, one wired MDI and other wired MDI-X or you might find some button to change one port's MDI to/from MDI-X.  Such "special" ports are often the "uplink" port.  (NB: the purpose of the "uplink" port was to allow connecting it to another switch whether you had a straight through or cross over cable.)

If you do have a switch supporting auto MDI/MDI-X, or one with the earlier physical MDI/MDI-X options, you only need one switch, not both with such a feature, to support either a straight through or cross over cable.  Of course, both switches might have such an option, which is fine too.  Only if both switches are "hard wired", you'll need a cross over cable for a switch to switch connection.

[Martin Carr]

As Daniel said.

It is important though that you know what media should be used when interconnecting devices and in the case of two switches it should be a crossover cable.

Cisco devices have DTP, a prorietary protocol, this is outside of the scope of what you want to know, but in a nutshell it will try and negociate a trunk when two switches are connected.

When interconnecting non Cisco devices, the port will simply function as an access port.

Martin - CCNA

[joshuacmoore]

Also keep in mind that native VLAN and PVID is often the same term when dealing with trunk/tagged ports.

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPhone App

[devils_advocate]

The whole PVID thing drives me mental when I have to go from a (decent) Cisco switch to something like a (inferior) HP or Netgear!

I get the whole PVID equates to the Native (i.e untagged) vlan when the port is doing 802.1Q tagging but why do they make you use a PVID and an Access Vlan on some whiches when they are standard access ports?? There is a large amount of inconsistency with the HP and other vendors.