Do Managed Switches Need Setup? – A Guide

Not all together happy with how this post turned out, but I've learned things that I didn't know before, so that's good.

For example, normally if two nodes (A and B) are connected to a switch which is on the downstream side of another device like your firewall, the switch will route packets from A -> B and vise versa without contacting anything upstream (from @Tedwin).

I decided to post my own answer with the good parts from the comments with @Panther Modern.

• Use higher quality hardware. Since I'm using Netgear ProSafe unmanaged switches, I'm considering upgrading to something like Cisco. @Mike Pennington suggested the SG300 series, which I have researched before and found on Amazon for less than $200. @Panther Modern suggests Arista, Cisco, Juniper and Brocade switches.

• Troubleshoot each piece independently and isolate the problem. I've done some of this, to the extent that I have isolated the general path, but in an environment where 100% uptime makes people happy and allows them to get work done, this can be tricky. But point taken...

• Consider topology and where you have access to and how many users you have. These factors can influence your choices for gear and how you go about answering your questions.

• Find good networking tools and use those to help troubleshoot your issue. pfSense helped a lot concerning traffic that passed through the firewall. I also learned about Robocopy for limiting traffic on the client. This tool works pretty well.

Sadly, no. The unmanaged switch doesn't have the ability to create or trunk VLANs (if it did, it would be a managed switch). It will treat all the PCs as if they were on the same VLAN.

If it were a mananged switch, you would configure the 3560 port as a trunk port. But your unmanaged switch will not understand VLAN tagging.