We have a no name dirt cheap switch at the centre of our Church network and I’m not a happy man with it. First and foremost it doesn’t allow me any control over well, anything. No vlans, no port security, no QoS, nothing.
Now some of these are probably a bit future tech for our place at the moment, but VLans and security aren’t ever future tech, they should be (in my opinion) minimum requirements for any switch. Unfortunately I had no say in the choice of hardware, or more accuraetly I wasn’t consulted until it came time to install and set it up! Hmmm.
All that aside, I’m intrigued as to what equipment (specifically network hardware) you guys use to keep your Churches running? Name names and models and if you have the time, tell me why you picked the ones you have (presuming you had that luxury) or why you like what you have?
As someone whom works daily with high end routers and switches (>75% from Cisco) I have a natural leaning towards them. They just work and never go wrong. Only he other day I logged on to a switch at the request of a server guy to check port errors, etc and found none and that the port had also never been cleared. Looked in to how long it had been up and running that way … >5yrs
Anyway – Cisco is currently way out of the range of my Church but I’m a keen fan of Linksys (now owned by Cisco of course) and the HP stuff is not bad either. It has the benefit of having a similar command structure to Cisco.
So come on guys and gals – fess up and tell Uncle Stu what routers, switches, firewalls, mail relays, anti whatever boxes and so on. Tell me privately if you prefer and I’ll report back the totals in another post if I get enough response.
