After obtaining my CCNA some months back it was great to put it to use and set-up a small network. The network consisted of two switches, two VLANs and a connecting trunk link.

Network requirements

I wanted to segment the network into two VLANs: one for lab devices and the other for management. As we needed more ports than one of the 24-port switches could supply, I wanted to trunk two switches together.

Configuration

I decided to use VLAN10 and 192.168.10.0/24 for my devices and VLAN20 and 192.168.20.0/24 for management. I wanted to use the trunk port to pass both VLAN10 & VLAN20 in order to have one port less needed for management. For the Netgear switches used, the default VLAN for a given port is specified through a PVID - this PVID specifies the VLAN that arriving untagged frames are equipped with. Ports denoted as U(ntagged), will strip the frames of VLAN ids and are used for end-devices. The trunk port on each switch was set to T(agged) - meaning that a frame will keep the VLAN information. After setting up the VLANs and the PVIDs I changed the management VLAN of the switches from the default to VLAN20. Unlike one of the guests in the Compiler podcast episode: Are Big Mistakes That Big Of A Deal who shut down a network port of a far-far away network switch and was in deep water for a few hours, I could just hardware reset my switch when I forgot at first to set the PVIDs and locked myself out from being able to access the switch. Who would have guessed: the default password of my switches was password.

Additional Resources

How do I setup a VLAN trunk link between two NETGEAR switches?