Has anyone used a different switch for their CMM4 or can recommend a better option for use with the CMM4 that worked for them?
Can you just take the Etherwan switch out and have the power ports operate as the switch? I understand I would be loosing out on some functionality and gigabit uplinks but I'll take that over just not working well.
Haven't bothered doing this, I came up with a config I like that treats it more like a CMM3 than a full switch. Has worked great for us the last few years.
Yes you could rip out the EtherWan and run cables from the CMM to another switch. At that point it'd just be a massive sync injector and PoE block.
When you say you use the CMM4 like the CMM3, what do you mean? Does the CMM4 work like the CMM3 if you simply yank the Etherwan switch? I guess that's what I don't really know.
I have (4) 450 AP's and a backhual running into the CMM4 now and I'd like for it to just work as a CMM3. But, I didn't know if you could use it without the switch or not becuase I haven't tried.
No, the base CMM4 board has no switching capability, it's just a sync and POE unit.
What I mean is that originally I treated the EtherWan like a normal Cisco switch on our network and loaded them up with VLANs. I didn't like that so I loaded a very simple configuration that uses port-based VLANs to isolate traffic between the APs, which is how I run my CMM3s. Now I don't have to touch the EtherWan switches ever. In the port-based mode, though, there is no VLAN ID for management traffic. I can post a config if you like.
I'd love to see your config. So, to be clear, you use the Etherwan switch but only in port-based Vlan mode instead of tagging mode? We are experiencing some weird ethernet issues up and down the tower- replaced cabling and AP already but still getting similar CRC errors and drops and I'm looking at simplifying the troubleshooting process by eliminating things. Thanks!
Yes, that's correct. VLAN mode won't have any bearing on your issues, though! Regardless here's a cleaned version of my configs. We run our CMM4s up with the APs and then just run power and uplink down to the box with the "real" switch at the base. With your cabling running that far there's a lot to check for... grounding, shielding, and RFI particularly. After reading so many threads here and on various mailing lists I'm very glad we don't operate on any FM towers!
Be VERY glad you're not on any FM towers and I do not recommend them unless you like the challenge of figuring out how to avoid the most craziest interference on ethernet runs and negotiation issues and throwing endless money and climbs into the fold. Nonetheless, this EtherWan switch doesn't want to behave at times so it's nice to see how other have set them up. Thanks for the info. Appreciated.
The Etherwan switch is fine until you get too big of a bridged network. We had trouble with corrupted ARP tables, which resulted in the switch multicasting packets to unrelated segments of our network. We had to replace it. We are now using a Mikrotik CRS125-24G-1S-IN. It's less than $200 and has more features than you can shake a stick at.
We use it as a wirespeed switch with port protection like you would setup a CMM3. The nice thing about this switch is the size. It fits inside the CMM4 and can be powered from the CMM4 just like the Etherwan. It is all gigabit and has an SPF port. It even has a display on the top that is again perfect for the CMM4, because of how you mount it. It easily monitors the throughput of each connected radio and will graph each interface for lookup purposes. There is a learning curve, but it does everything you can think of.