| I've the exact same needs, and by occasion got hold of cisco SG300-10 switch, which I think fits the description - so I thought to share my experience, in case it is useful. I use it for the home lab, where I have a one-armed router serving multiple VLANs, and I have 3x MacMinis running Linux as a "server farm" (The latter I use because they are quite a good gear power-management wise, scaling from ~18W at idle up to ~250W when all cores are busy, and because they are very very quiet, which is handy when the "lab" is next to the bedroom). The biggest complain I have about this box is that the only way to manage is the Web UI, and especially the 802.1q configuration is a bit unintuitive (though I just learned the firmware is actually upgradable to something with decent IOS CLI, so I will try it out and update here the impressions). Otherwise, needing just a very simple L2 switching and 802.1q trunking at gigabit speeds, and fanless operation - I am pretty happy with it. 8 ports works well in my setup (the main segmentation/trunking is really in the lab, the rest is either wireless, or directly connected to the "border router"). Where I needed to add more access ports, I used http://www.conrad.com/ce/en/product/976050/CE-Port-Network-S... to help. Also based on my experience seems to be quite a solid building block for a small home/lab network. full disclosure: I do work for cisco. EDIT: the upgrade to the latest firmware indeed unearthed the checkboxes to enable telnet/ssh, as well as quite a few new features, comparable if not more than the "bigger brothers". What's pleasant is a quite comprehensive IPv6 support. |
My main hesitation is the proprietary firmware. Now I'm not going to disagree with anyone arguing that Cisco knows what they're doing and is competent at putting together firmware for the hardware they sell. Nor will I disagree with anyone arguing that open source is not a magical talisman ensuring quality. No, my main concerns are a) timeliness of critical updates, and useful lifetime of the hardware vs support lifetime.
Being open source cannot prevent bugs, but once found, fixes tend to become available quickly. Also, I have found that the useful lifetime of computing and networking hardware tends to exceed the period of time the vendor will offer support for it. I have gigabit ethernet switches I bought years ago that still work just fine, even though they're no longer sold. That's what I love about OpenWRT. The hardware my home router uses is discontinued, but still does the job just fine, and I can still get updates when I need to.
That said, I think I will be checking the SG300 out. Thanks for the recommendation.