Introduction

I finally gave in an bought some managed switches. I’d been considering a UniFi USW-Pro-XG-48-PoE but its pretty expensive and I’m not a fan of the management setup with Ubiquiti kit.

Basically I need 48 ports that are faster than gigabit and a few 10gbe ports. Management is a nice extra, not really interested in PoE or fibre.

Sodola - A Customer Service Fail

So I got two Sodola 24 port 2.5gbe web-managed switches as they were a good deal on Amazon; and also from Sodola directly, their 16 port 10gbe web-managed switch - which it turns out, doesn’t actually exist and I instead received their 2.5gbe unmanaged switch which costs considerably less than I paid!

So, not only did the 16 port switch take a week and a half to arrive, but it was the much lower spec and cheaper model than I paid for, which I could have bought from Amazon with next day delivery….

I contacted Sodola support who seemed unwilling to refund me or pay for the shipping back to China, instead they offered me an unbadged 4+8 port switch which was still cheaper than the model I ordered and SFP+ not RJ45, so they offered two SFP+ to RJ45 transceivers which would take me to 6x RJ45 and 6x SFP+ instead of the 16+2 I ordered, oh and charged me extra for the privilege of keeping the useless 16 port switch!

Lessons learned: never buy from Sodola direct, go via Amazon and pay a bit more but get free refunds and fast delivery.

The 24 port switches have arrived and seem pretty nice, the web management is quite basic but at the moment my only interest there is LACP for my ProxMox boxes which have 2x 2.5gbe NICs, and IGMP snooping to silence the BTTV box’s multicast blasting.

I’ve got 3 devices that can do 10gbe and about 8 that can do 2.5gbe, they were previously all sharing the 8 port NICGIGA and the rest were all hanging off a 48-port Netgear 1gbe. So eventually I’ll have a spare 10gbe port and 9 spare 10gb SFP+ ports (with 2 RJ45 transceivers) as the 2.5gbe devices will use the 2.5gbe switches not 10gbe.

Update: I received the 12-port today, 8 days after reporting I’d received the wrong kit. It works ok, although it defaults to Chinese glyphs and every time I login I have to click the English button (Sodola support provided me with a new firmware to fix this) It also doesn’t have activity LED’s for the SFP+ at all. My Mac and two Debian boxes are running at 10Gbps as is the DAC uplink to the 2.5Gbps switch. I’ve not tried the RJ45 to SFP+ adapters yet. It also worked fine with a 2.5gbe NIC.

Accessories

I ordered three DAC cables to uplink the three switches via their SFP+ ports, they work well, although I should have ordered 30-50cm not 1m.

I also bought a 12U open-frame rack and a PDU as I’ll need 6 plugs and it looks cleaner/safer than a regular power strip, although the PDU doesn’t fit well due to its rack ears being too tall and a poorly positioned mains cable.

I designed and 3D printed some M6 cage nut washers as whilst the rack came with 42 nice black cage nuts and bolts, they didn’t include the washers.

The rack comes with a couple of trays although I’m only using one - which houses both of my ProxMox MiniPC’s, getting one off my desk and freeing up some wallports.

So I moved my 48-port patchpanel into the new rack, it wasn’t too difficult although I overestimated the space I’d have in the loft section and the amount of slack on the cabling.

I also bought a label printer as the laser printed labels don’t seem to want to stay stuck to metal. That was quite a good deal, especially as you can get cheaper compatible labels from Temu, although a backlight and case would have been nice.

Photos

Here’s the before picture showing the Ikea Lack Rack:

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Here’s the finished setup - with 3 new switches, PDU, rack, MiniPC’s, cabling and labels:

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Configuration & Compatibility

This was a good ProxMox LACP bonding tutorial, although I think maybe if you’re running a cluster you need to do something differently, as I configured one just fine and then the other one became unreachable and I had to plug in a keyboard and monitor to fix it. The switch part wasn’t very intuitive but I figured it out from the manual and I now have LACP working.

I had to disable 9k jumbo frames as Proxmox and my desktop never seem to like it (Mac, laptop and fileserver seem ok) and testing it with ping -c4 -M do -s 8972 <host> doesn’t actually seem to work despite me enabling it on the switch.

My two eero Pro 6E’s seem to still work ok - some people say their mesh technology doesn’t play nice with managed switches (something about them not liking STP?) but like most things eero I think its just FUD.