Layer 2+ Swtich

[Peon]

Hi Guys

The sales rep at Rectron cant answer my question.

In interested in purchasing this L2 Switch

Its a L2+ switch with 2 GBIC ports. All I want to know is this, can I give one of the fibre ports an IP address for example?

Ive got a corporate customer that needs to connect to a sister companies file server over 5km away. The fibre is in and all but I dont believe bridging the 2 networks is the right thing to do

They on different subnets. So what I planned on doing is just adding a static route on the current gateway that points to the L2+ switch if a request is needed for the remote server on the other network. Also in this way we can control security better. This is just what I believe, I could be wrong and thats why im posting here asking for advice.

A router is probably better but its more expensive, anyone is welcome to give examples if they deem fit.

Peon

 

[NoCause]

Hi,

if the 2 offices are connected with fibre, then you will need a Layer 3 Switch actually. You will need to put the 2 sites into diffirent vlans as well.

 

[NoCause]

Also,

Layer 2 switch is based on mac addresses and layer 3 switching is based on network topology table populated. So user a Layer 3 switch with the fibre connecting via the GBIC port.Then the diffirent subnets and so on wont make a diff.

 

[savage]

You will need a L3 switch if you want to assign IPs to ports, route, etc..

 

[ponder]

No, you cannot do routing on a layer 2 device.

What you can however do is configure a trunk between the two switches and passing on the 802.1q VLANs from the one switch to the other. This is only valid if the switch on the other side is a layer 3 device that can do inter vlan routing and supports trunking and 802.1q OR alternatively you have a decent router on that side that is capable of doing the inter vlan routing.

That switch does have support for static routes on multiple subnets but obviously the traffic still has to be passed on to the default gateway/router.

I suggest you read the manual, http://www.zyxel.com/web/support_do...40906173729&ModelIndexflags=0,420041130111108

 

[damian24]

Just looking at your setup, a router for passing gigabit traffic is gonna be pricey, if it's fibre and they only need to access the server then setup the network card on the server to do tagged VLAN and then put that network port on the the default VLAN for the local network and the remote network vlan (put the fibre on the same VLAN as you put the server on but make it untagged)

This way the network are totally split with the exception of the network card for the server which will look like 2 network interfaces with different IP addresses. if it's a windows server, you could use if to route traffic using RAS and inter-office routing.

D