My current place of employment is a very small print shop with average home networking equipment. I have a spare switch I could give them, but I don't want to hand them a ticking timebomb at the same time.
The shop has 7 Clients, 3 servers, & 6 IP printers. They currently have a 16 port 10/100 d-link switch, and a netgear gigabit switch that is connected to the servers. They seem to be somewhat flakey, unless they are rebooted every few weeks. They bosses seem to be ok with an occasional interruption with the current setup, as long as it's only for a few mins.
My question is, would a Cisco Catalyst 2950 switch be ok to use in production? I have never used it outside of my CCNA lab, it works great but is now collecting dust. I am thinking of "donating" it to them, but only if it will help things. I was thinking of even setting up two, one unplugged as a spare ready to go. If their pc using staff grows much higher and starts using a domain, I would probably go the procurve route.
Best Answer
I see from the Cisco datasheet that the 2950 is a 12, 24, or 48-port 10/100 switch, which can possibly also have two gig ports. Actually I think I used some of these in a previous job.
Cisco equipment is generally quite reliable. That switch certainly won't perform any less well than the existing home networking equipment they have set up. Hopefully the 2950 you have is big enough so you can consolidate all the existing equipment on to it instead of running two separate switches. The Cisco equipment is also managed, so you could potentially do some snmp monitoring and remote configuration if desired.
If your 2950 is the one with a couple of gig ports, you could connect the 2 busiest of the 3 servers to those ports. That could provide a small performance boost over the existing setup, if the client machines are all communicating with the servers.
So hey, go for it! Setting up this switch sounds like a great use of older hardware.