I was doing some work for WYEP 91.3fm. They were having issues with their network, and the company (Who now no longer exists) that designed their network completely overcomplicated it, making it a pain to troubleshoot any of the issues.
They have two floors with like 10-15 ish computers per floor, and a Cisco Express 500 switch per floor. Between the two floors they had about 6 VLANs setup, with no labels or anything.
I decided to put everything on VLAN 1 to make things a bit simpler. I did so on both switches and the problems they were having sorted themselves out. Only problem is I now have NO access to the Web GUI at all, and I have no idea why, or how to go about fixing the problem as the Express 500 doesn’t have a console port.
Everything works fine now, however not having the ability to configure the switches can and probably will bite me in the ass later on.
there is probably a good reason they had everything setup in multiple vlans. If I was you I would hard reset the switches and start from scratch designing there network
The more and more I look at it though, the more it makes no sense at all though. Downstairs and upstairs were on separate vlans, and they were having issues sharing data / printers, three or so computers downstairs were on a separate vlan than the rest of them, and they were having sharing issues together. It was overcomplicated for what they needed. Putting everyone on one vlan fixed all of their issues, it’s just that I no longer have access to the web gui of the switches, that’s what I’m trying to figure out.
Completely redesigning the network is something I’m planning on doing down the road, but I’m trying to do it with the least amount of downtime, as I do not want to knock them off of the air. Right now, I just wanna figure these cheap ass switches out.