 Time here for more on systems and let's talk about Cisco small business switches. Matter of fact, let's talk about them being affordable. Affordable with the word Cisco in the name is relative, but I think these are reasonably priced switches that have a nice locally managed web interface that is relatively easy to set up. Now it's a little quirky, we're actually gonna cover what that web interface looks like for a couple different models and I will mention the dashboard which Cisco reached out to me on and I have a video where, well, we'll just call it a rant video, but I do cover all the problems I ran into with the Cisco dashboard. I think it's a horrible and terrible product. It does have licensing unlike the switches. So if you want to use the dashboard software, good luck getting it to work. If you can't get it to work, there's a lot of limitations and licenses that come with it and I will save the rest of that rant video I have where, yes, I did reach out to Cisco and, no, the software hasn't gotten any better since I made that video seven months ago and I've asked friends and I've had other people reach out to me since that video that I'll just agreed with me that it sucks and some of these people were pretty much, well, other Cisco people. Back to the topic of the switches, if you're just looking for a switch that has local management interface and is reliable and reasonably priced, well, that's what we are gonna talk about is those Cisco small business switches. Let's jump into it. Now, not gonna be included because I've done a previous video on this one. Matter of fact, I bought it a while ago. This is the Cisco Catalyst 1000. This is a different than the other line of switches, the 250 and the 350 series that we're talking about. But as I said, I got a review link down below. No, I'll leave a link to this particular graphic. This is an overview of the lineup switches. I'm not gonna look at any of the unmanaged home and small office ones. We're gonna look, though, at the CBS 220 and CBS 350. Now, as mentioned, the Cisco Business Dashboard is a disaster linked video down below, so we're not gonna be covering any of that. I'm gonna be using these completely as independent devices and just kind of quickly going over some of the features on there. And that first thing I want to talk about is the price because if it doesn't fit your budget, there's no need going further down the rabbit hole of whether or not this is a good product. Now, this particular model, and this is the one I have, is a 24 port POE. All 24 ports are POE. And then we have four 10 gig SFP plus. And no, they don't require that you have Cisco DAC to plug into them. They'll work with non Cisco DAC. And this particular unit at $618. It only has a 195 watt power budget, but that may be plenty for you. This has been a great little switch we've been using in our lab for a bit. And I've had no problems with it. I think the interface is relatively good. And let's just jump over to interface and talk about it. But $618 right here in August of 2023, not a bad price for this switch. All right, so let's log into this switch. And we have a pretty reasonable web interface here. We can get system summary statistics. We can see the POE usage. Currently we're using 50 watts. I've got this plugged into my office with a bunch of cameras plugged into it. We're only using 50 of the 195 watts. You can go into the detail of the POE. You can set thresholds. There's a lot of customization in here. Lots of detailed port settings. And this is all covered very well in our documentation. Of note, when you do things, let's say we go to the VLAN settings. We want to add another VLAN. So we'll click Add and we go to VLAN 33. We'll just give it the same name and we hit Apply. It does remind you to permanently save the configuration, go to the file operations, or click the Save icon. When you apply something in these Cisco switches, it applies it to the running config, but not the boot config. As in, if you reboot the switch, those settings will just go away. And to make them permanent, you click the Save and it'll be available at boot time. And I like that it does remind you each time. And you get this little icon at the top right here that you can click Save and then Save the configuration on here. And the next one I want to talk about is the Cisco Small Business CBS 350 8P2G. I've been using this in my studio for a while to run a handful of things. It's actually worked really well. But there is definitely some more quirkiness with the CBS 350 series center was with the 220 series, which is a little odd to me. You'd think the 350 being higher end wouldn't have some of this quirkiness. And the first quirkiness I want to show is the login page. That's not me doing anything with the video here. It didn't freeze. It just pauses this long to load the page. And every subsequent page loads a little bit faster than the login page, but not that much faster. This is actually kind of a pain that I don't really understand why it's like this, but it's just very slow motion when you're doing things. Now, the good news is once you've configured a bunch of switch ports, you usually don't spend a ton of time in a switch, but just be aware it will test your patience going through and setting things up because there's a lot of pausing that this does. And this is normal. I've tried this on more than one model. The web interface is just made like this. The cool thing that the 350 series has is configuration wizards though. Now, now the page is loaded the first time we're gonna be able to get a little bit faster. Don't worry, it's getting there. Come on, let's get to that configuration wizard. It'll come up, there we go. And yes, that's completely normal behavior in here to pull up the wizard. The settings we're gonna go through is a little less painful, but the wizards definitely like clicking through slow motion. I'm probably gonna fast forward some of this video in a second here if it doesn't load because I don't wanna bore the audience. Well, there we go, it loaded without me fast forwarding. VLAN configuration wizard. I think this is a great feature because if you're not familiar with setting up VLANs on Cisco, you're a little new to it. This will walk you through creating the VLANs, clicking on the ports. You can actually say, hey, let's grab the ports I wanna tag with different VLANs. And you can next, yes, your way through configuring this and setting it up. I think this is a really cool feature that this particular device has. Now, let's go over and look at like the status and statistics. These pages load a lot better than the login page and the page related to the wizard. So you can still go here and click on each one of these ports. It'll bring you right to the port setting. So they've added some extra features. This is probably why this is slower than a 220, but it gives you all these features right here. And I think this is pretty reasonable. You get all the cool features that you can easily access and see what's plugged in to each one of the ports on the switch. For example, port one does have operational status up because that's the port I'm logged into and using right now. But overall, this switch has been trouble free. I've been using it for a while, just for some lab stuff, and it works quite well. Now, something I will note, the Cisco Catalyst 1000 switch that I mentioned beginning has a light version of Cisco iOS. But the 220 and 350, they do not have iOS. You can, SSH, or even they have Telnet as an option, log into them from a command line terminal. They do have the ports on the back so you can do it physically via a Cisco serial cable, but you're not gonna find iOS under the hood of these. It would be considered maybe an iOS-like experience, but a very cut down one. So if you're a Cisco person or you would like to get your Cisco certifications, these are not a inexpensive switch you can buy to learn on because they're not gonna be full-blown, full-featured Cisco iOS operating system on there. Now, the switches that I do find pretty reliable. I've had them for a little while and they've given me no problems. I have several friends that have used them and they seem to be a pretty solid system and Cisco's been good with the updates because, yes, there has been vulnerabilities in certain aspects of them and Cisco has released patches and updates and I have them on the latest firmware. Now, if you're interested in getting these, I've left some affiliate links down below over to Amazon. If you'd like to see more content from this channel, like and subscribe. If you wanna connect with me, head over to the forums, forums.lauranceystems.com or just go to laursystems.com and connect with me on whatever socials are available when you're watching this video. All right, and thanks.