I think I answered my own question here based on the fact that the switches don’t have their own category. I really like the Balance routers, and have put in numerous SD Switches so as to compliment the installs and to unify management. However, the basics are not there and I find my self using decades old switches instead.
PrimeCare for these is way too expensive for something less functional than a UniFi product.
These switches have no LLDP-MED. Who needs multiple PSU’s in a product that doesn’t have something as basic as LLDP-MED? (Auto VoIP for you Netgear users) Deploying 300 handsets, absolutely not on a Peplink network. No I shouldn’t have to use DHCP options. Rarely do I have access to the primary DHCP server, nor can their admins be trusted not to hose things up.
Default VLAN’s are switch wide. - there is no way that I have found to actually specify the untagged VLAN on a per port basis. I recently had to add a third switch on a network I shouldn’t have had to because I needed the untagged VLAN to be different. (and still have access to other tagged VLANS) Such as an Access Point that should have no access to the protected networks what so ever but needs to serve multiple different network segments. If it weren’t for AP’s this wouldn’t be such a big deal other than the troubleshooting headaches it causes. The AP’s have to have an Untagged SSID provisioned or they will not communicate with InControl. So, put those two issues together and it’s a big problem. Why do you need an SSID provisioned on the untagged VLAN for the ethernet port to communicate with InControl?, seems ridiculous.
They are kind of noisy, not horrible, but bad enough you don’t want them in an office.
The OUI lookup on InControl or local to the switch doesn’t seem very good at resolving MFG to MAC. That may be a setting I missed, if so the column shouldn’t be present. Or the column should read disabled rather than unknown.
To date my only work around has been to use something else. Anything Else. Even consumer grade “Smart” products you can buy at Office Depot have Auto VoIP. Aruba Instant and Unifi are two examples of product that has free cloud management…for now. They both do this. Peplink’s hardware is more expensive than all of those examples.
If someone has answers I haven’t learned, please share them.
At the end of the day, if the feature exists on a web managed product and an experienced tech can’t find it, that in and of itself presents a big problem.
Oof, I was also looking at the peplink switches for the same reason despite the high initial and ongoing cost, looks like I’ll be sticking with unifi and omada for now.
We have been waiting to hear from Peplink vis-a-vis a new line of switches. Maybe Peplink can provide an update. Indeed we have an approved “deal” on hold due to this issue and have reluctantly diverted customers to other products. Perhaps @Alex can comment. :<)
I recently ordered 4x 48 ports and was told they they were unavailable with no expected production for additional units.
Maybe they are updating the hardware? Seems features like settable untagged VLAN and LLDP-MED would be an easy software add.
Those things are minor annoyances but haven’t been showstoppers. One do appreciate that the peplink switches I have in service have been extremely stable.
Absolutely true – and that information was certainly helpful. But what I don’t see there is the outline of a plan. What should our expectations be of a line of switches – if any? What are we to tell existing and prospective customers? What will be available --and when?
In the same boat here, Things as simple as DEFAULT VLAN = UNTAGGED, seems impossible, it WANTS TO tag VLAN 1, which is not the same as untagged, when mixed with pep routers, you have vlan 0 (untagged) and vlan 1 and vlan 1 is NOT untagged on other devices, there needs to be an option to set VLAN 0 (not vlan 1) as default, meaning untagged, you can do this on the routers but not on the switches, I cant get APs to get ip on the untagged because of this, and its driving me insane
Aps try to get ip on the “default” vlan which is 1 for switches, cant be untagged
the switch uplinks to another device i do not have control over, this device has untagged free and open, (dhcp works fine) and does not allow any tagged vlans unless it has them specified
so when the Pepswitch sends traffic on the vlan 1 instead of untagged, the other device sees vlan 1 as a non existent vlan and drops the traffic…
i had to ask the person managing the device to make a new vlan called vlan 1 and bridge it with untagged, and it finally worked.
Switches need to be able to just handle everything untagged, without vlans, even vlan 1, its just basic stuff
I hope this gets fixed, being able to see and manage each port via incontrol is the most amazing thing ever, but this kinda thing just kills me every time.
For proof:
On the Configure network settings on the swtich, there is no “untagged” vlan, you must select vlan 1
and on incontrol, on the vlan management page, you can see untagged and management vlan 1 as separate vlans, so much so that they can have different IPs, and when you click on select default vlan “untagged” is not an option on the drop down selection menu…
It should be possible to just select DEFAULT VLAN = UNTAGGED on incontrol…
someone already complained about it on the forum here, im surprised no one has noticed for this long this is a major game breaking problem, i’ve had to had workarounds for years work around this issue and its never been fixed.
Digging up an old thread whilst looking for some info on Peplink switches before purchasing…
The VLAN issue is confusing but not uncommon. I had a similar issue when trying to pass VRRP heartbeat packets between a high availability pair of balance routers over a Cisco Meraki switch stack. The heartbeats are only sent/received on the untagged VLAN on the routers but you can’t have untagged VLANs on Cisco switches (like Peplinks it seems). It is annoying that you can’t change the management VLAN on the routers, but that aside, the solution is to understand how untagged packets are treated on certain switches.
If you Google the topic, you’ll find that when you send untagged packets at a trunk port on certain switches they are NOT tagged with the default VLAN, they simply enter the switch and remain untagged but are switched to other ports which have the same VLAN id (be it access ports or default on trunk ports) and exit the port untagged. Therefore, if you need to pass untagged packets through a switch just make sure you use a unique VLAN id for this purpose (on some switches this is the default behaviour of VLAN 1) and don’t configure the same VLAN id on the router.
As an example: configure VLAN id 999 as the default for trunk ports on the switches where the Peplink routers and APs are connected, don’t configure 999 on the routers or APs for anything else. Untagged packets from these devices will pass across the switches using any rules for VLAN 999 and emerge at the trunk ports as untagged.