 Tom here from Warren Systems. We're going to talk about the Cisco Catalyst 1000 switches. These are targeted at small business because they're affordable and they are license-free, which is not something I expected to say about Cisco all in one sentence like that. I purchased these and the adventure starts on December 9th, and I want to bring up that I bought them. This is not paid for or endorsed by Cisco. The review I'm going to do is my opinion and I'm not a Cisco person, so to speak. I'm not a Cisco engineer. I'm not a certified Cisco person. And if you've watched this channel for any length of time, you know, I'm not necessarily the biggest Cisco fan. I find them to be a little bit quirky and sometimes overly complicated to get tasks done. And it's one of the reasons I prefer some of the other network vendors. But I will give, as they say, the devil they're due. Cisco does make a very solid and reliable device. They are notably, and many of our clients have these, that they've been installed for years. And despite occasional reboots for a firmware update, they do last. You usually pull a Cisco out because of obsolescence and being in a really old switch, not because it failed. And these being a fanless design, the two models that I have right here passively cooled, I would expect a very long service life out of them. But I also want to address directly that network chuck video about the auto configuration and it not going the way I expected. I bring this up because I was impressed when I thought they auto configured like that, which is part of the reason I bought two of them. I wanted to see if they would automatically stack and they don't. And I'm being very specific about this because they don't automatically stack, but you can manually configure them. I want to give a big shout out to Willie Howe. He spent some time with me diving into the technical things because Willie is someone who knows Cisco very well and confirmed about the way these work. I also did read through the Cisco documentation. They do not auto configure. There is some specifics to the way you configure and we will cover in this review. But before we dive into all these details, let's first. If you'd like to learn more about me and my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short project, there's a hires button right at the top. If you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has, there is a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page. Your support is greatly appreciated. If you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel, check out the affiliate links down below. They're in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store. We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out. Well, randomly, so check back frequently. And finally, our forums. Forums.LauranceSystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel. Now, back to our content. Now, both of these eight-port switches, the PoE and the non-PoE, have pretty much the same chassis. The only thing really different here is the non-PoE has a built-in and then on the PoE, we have a power brick, an external one. Now, let's take a look at the switch ports a little bit closer. Now, you have your options right here for how you want to console in. You have the little button right here, which you hold in for four seconds, which will show us how to get this configured and set up. Then we have all your standard switch ports and then we have the combo ports. Now, the combo ports can be used either in the RG45 or in the SFP, but not both simultaneously. So this is port nine for SFP and port nine for RG45 and the same goes for port 10. Now, this is the PoE model. So we have the little yellow labeling here and shows that it's PoE. And then on the back, we have a Kensington lock and the spot for the four-pin, 54 volt, 1.6 amp power supply. The other one, like I said, looks identical. Pretty much the same as far as the front of the chassis goes. It just doesn't have any power labels, same shared ports, same access, but then a standard connector on the back and a Kensington lock on the side. So not much difference there as far as how the switches themselves look. They're pretty much, like I said, the same chassis and they do not have or did not come with any frackiers or ability to mount them. So they are standalone switches like this. I do have some screw holes on the side, but not anything that would allow you to easily mount something for them. There's probably some kit you can order, but as I ordered from Amazon, this is how they came. Now, the stacking. We should jump right into that part of it because the single IP management and the network truck video was where my immediate confusion came in. I was excited to see a Cisco switch that would configure the first switch and deploy every subsequent switch. A couple things. In order to get H stacking to work, you do need to use the SFP. So even though these are combo ports, if you plug them in and stack these together and you use the RJ45, it will not configure H stack. It can only work over the SFP. So plugging it in like this won't work, but if we plug in SFP modules and go over here and put this one here and this one here, you can use them as uplink over the RJ45, but you can't use them for the single IP management. Next thing is the transceivers themselves. Whether you're using a fiber transceiver, a DAC TwinX cable, or in this case an RJ45 adapter, they require that you use Cisco. Very specifically, it has to be tag Cisco. We tried the Cisco command, which is technically undocumented, that allows the use of third-party non-Sysco branded transceivers, and it just didn't work. The command is there, and this is where Willie helped me out. So you have to use Cisco. And these are important details, I think, when you're pointing this out, when if someone were to buy this to build out a small office, and maybe they bought some of the larger 2440 port models of this, and they wanted to build out that single IP management interface, you can't just run a cable over to it. You have to run an SFP. That's just part of the way it sets up. And that SFP has to be, and if you're a Cisco person, you're like, oh yeah, you just typed the command in, except for on the Cisco Catalyst 1000, that command just does not function, and you do have to use Cisco SFPs. So little details when you're buying them out. Next little detail about Hdac and how that works. Is this line right here? 1G switches can only be grouped with 1G switches and 10G switches only with 10G switches. So if you mix and match your switches, and here's their lineup of all the ones that have just 1G ports on them, and these are the models that offer 10G ports on them. So you have 4 10G ports on these, and you have only the 1G ports on here. Therefore, you can't mix and match them. So if you were to buy a handful of like these, C1048FP 4XL, the 10G ones, you could group those together into a single management stack, and you could group any of these models over here into a single management stack, but then you would have two stacks to manage. I just want to make sure some of that is clear as part of the review, because I think these things matter quite a bit when you're looking at a switch and you want to order a kit out. You want to make sure everything you buy works the way you expect it to, or at least that you have all the parts to complete your network. So once all that's out of the way, no big deal. Now the Hdac itself, the auto-configure like showed in Chuck's video may come from the fact that once you configure Hdac and you take these switches and I configure them to talk to each other and wander through the configuration, which by the way is all documented right here. It can be done in a web interface, but it also can be done right through here from the command line. Cisco's got plenty of documentation on it. And for Cisco veterans, it's pretty straightforward. If you're less familiar with Cisco commands, it may be a little bit more complex. But what this does is allow you to log into one switch and control all the ports for all the switches that you've stacked together into the single IP management interface. And once you configure the Hdac on these, they survive a right erase reset. So if you reset the config and you've already configured the Hdac, when you reset the config and start setting a switch up again and plug them in, they'll actually start talking again over the Hdac, which I thought was interesting. It doesn't go to the normal right config. So this is what happens when you set them up and then maybe erase them. And I'm assuming that's probably what Chuck had done in his video. So he was unclear on it, but he set them up and then they will start deploying. What they won't do, though, is from a factory fresh out of the box, plug them in. Even if you've configured the first switch, each subsequent switch you plug in with an SFP doesn't auto-configure and add to it without going through the manual process as laid out in the Cisco documentation. Now, how do you get these set up? That's actually pretty simple. And we'll go ahead and switch over to the console screen and show you how that goes. All right, we plugged it in and booting it up. First time it boots, it does take roughly 60 seconds before it's ready. It goes through verifying the image and the boot up process steps. All right, and now the switch is booted up. Now, you do not need to use this console cable to do this. This was just a way so I can show what's going on during the boot process here. And then you can go here and walk through the setup. What's interesting is you have to hold the status LED three to four seconds and then release it. We'll show what that does on the screen. But what they don't mention is you can do it through the CLI, but what they're not mentioning here is what happens if I start touching buttons on here. I bring that up because if you start at all messing with the CLI here, you can run through the CLI to configure this still so it can be set up manually, but it will then stop that button from working. And when I first got this, it's a little bit confused and on there, so I wanted to see what was going on and I started going through it and I'm like, okay, let me hold the button now. No, once you've started typing here, it seems to stop that button from working. But we're going to go ahead and hold the button in so you can see what does happen on the screen. There we go. And we have now Express Mode entered. Once you enter Express Mode, the switch will be assigned the IP address of both 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.3. Plug in a network cable and please note I had nothing plugged in before. I believe if you plug in a network cable and it finds a DHCP server, it also won't let it go into auto setup. I had run into that where I thought I could just have it all plugged in and ready and go through this setup. When it finds a DHCP server, it doesn't necessarily go into auto setup. Just things that I think are important to note on these. Now that I've plugged this in, I'll go ahead and ping to make sure I can reach it. All right, I can reach 10.0.0.3 there or I can reach 10.0.0.3, like I said, it assigns both. My laptop, I've already assigned statically to 10.0.0.2 and now we can actually jump into the configuration. The day zero wizard will provide an interface to configure your basic settings like IP, username and VLAN. Go to wizard, set up the host name, set up the username, password, and we'll just throw some stuff in here real quick. Build out your interface configuration, set your data VLAN, data wireless, VN access port. So some of the basics can be configured. IP addresses you want assigned to it. Subnet and default gateway, summary, and now we can log in. Now I've already got the other switch configured at a different IP address. Let me go ahead and pull that one up real quick. And here we are at the dashboard. Now this is the dashboard specifically to the PoE one and they're the same except for the extra PoE option. So I figured I'd show you this one because well, there's those couple extra features that are in here. Now here's your uplink ports and by default out of the box they're configured as uplink ports. But then if we were to configure into HDAC they will disappear and be part of the HDAC ports that are in here. But overall the dashboard is pretty basic and simple, gets the job done. It doesn't offer you a lot. It offers you kind of just some viewing and stats of what's going on, show you what clients are connected. It does allow you to do configuration for the switch settings and the HDAC settings. So if you didn't want to configure them in terms of going from the command line option you can go in here and do this. Of note because this works very much like a Cisco where you have to save the config and reload it. That's important because it says update and apply to device but then you still have to remember to restart the device or the command in Cisco is reload to apply all those configurations. Also of note when you're configuring to Cisco is the option after you change things to save the configuration up here. Are you sure you want to save this configuration? Because you can apply a change that may happen but you don't write that change out and for those of you familiar with the Cisco and when you're doing it from the command line right of the running config is an important step that sometimes people forget and then they reboot the switch later and they didn't save the running config to the boot time config so that is important that you do that on these switches. You do get alerts and error message up here and one of the annoyances is right out of the box these constantly try to reach out and do TFTP and will just generate errors until you turn it off. That is actually part of the default config but I did leave it on so I could show that every now and then it will just kick out a TFTP error because that's how they work out of the box until you configure them and tell them not to do that. You can go through and do the port configurations here, general settings, port settings, advanced settings but some of the even more advanced security settings I didn't notice them in here at all that's still something you're going to have to go through on the command line. Troubleshooting this was a bit of confusion because I didn't know where to reboot the switch apparently you reboot it under troubleshooting not under settings or services and this is also where you would go and do a factory reset if you want to reset the switch without going to the command line to do the right erase and do it. You can restart the switch here or factory reset it all together. You do have ping and trace route few other diagnostics you can do all test-based tests take a look at the logs or the debugging information I like that they've done this right here so you can just copy things or download them so now we can go and pull these logs up in a text editor so definitely very convenient for when you're troubleshooting without having to drop back and forth or try to highlight and copy in some weird way I can just hit that and go to there. VLAN configuration can be done in here services static routing this does not support anything more than just static routes. I do like this without plugging into the console we can just exec or run config type commands such as show version and we can see that this is running version 15.27E1 security settings, access policies ACL span options routing protocol, Arman and QoS so you can do quite a bit of configuration through the Web Interface and it Web Interface is reasonable enough management now I was disappointed here that you can't enable SSH so if you went through the wizard and didn't go through the configuring of SSH you can still go through and do it from the command line through the console but there's not a way to just turn it on inside of here by default it supports both HTTP on port 80 and HTTPS on port 443. Here's where you reload your firmware update for the web UI or the iOSM web UI pushing there. Disappointing part is it does not automatically go to Cisco's website to try to pull the firmware you have to go to Cisco's website and download it by the way you have to register and it also took a few days before Cisco validated my account apparently there's some type of it says doing a background check was the email they do a background check or something along those lines before validating emails which I thought was strange then they'll let you download the firmware and get these things up to date then under system we have config file DHCP and this is where you can actually transfer to the switch from the switch to a TFTP server or download the file so you can pull the config out and it does support multi-user administration and then they have some of the help documents here so pretty straightforward I think once you have them set up hold it for a few seconds I kind of glossed over the fact that it does have bluetooth to me that seems like an odd way I've never thought I've really had a desire to configure the switch bluetooth neat that they threw that in there but I mean maybe some more devices come with bluetooth like laptops because it just lets you get to the interface differently and I guess it's as long as bluetooth proximity base so you can enable it so you don't have to do the cable but for me SSH seems like a better way to do that but the web interface is usable for those of you that are looking for a little more power and or just want to start learning on Cisco yes you have full access to that you know the Cisco iOS 15 software my understanding though this will not run anything other than what they've referred to as classic iOS it doesn't do the newer I think it's iOS XE and XR like said Cisco is not my exact forte but I think they're a good lineup that are fitting that budget for people go you know I just want to see that Cisco name in my rack and I trust that and I have a strong use case for the way Cisco does their security or you're familiar with it they're great because they're now something that will still fit the client's budget and make Cisco people very happy and so I don't think they're a bad purchase in that circumstance yes of course they're still going to be other people that are out there that have other offerings that are a little bit less money but this is one of the few times I've seen where you can buy the Cisco switch and have all those fancy features for a really reasonable price I think at that $300 mark that's actually like I said for Cisco that's actually pretty good and I'm kind of surprised like I said I didn't think I'd say affordable Cisco in there it's still going to be on a little bit higher inside but I won't argue about the reliability I mean to be a fan of some of the quirks of Cisco software or the fact that it doesn't like anything but Cisco SFP adapters or that the single IP management interface can only be grouped with certain switches and some of the other gotchas but I won't argue that if I put this in I will trust it to be working several years later without even anybody doing anything to it so I will hand Cisco that on reliability take that for what it's worth let me know in the comments below what you think of these and I'll post this over in my forums as well thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you'd like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time