Working on a medium sized office network which only has a single PoE switch for WAPs. About 200 users. No copper to the desk… It made sense to buy a second PoE switch to give a bit of redundancy, even if it’s for manually swapping cables in case switch A dies.

Plug in switch, wait for power up and decide to test the manual failover over lunch. Gateway plugged in, flashing lights. WAPs plugged in, flashing lights. Wireless network visible but can’t connect as there’s no DHCP. Swap everything back and we’re back in business.

The switch is unuseable until I’ve installed an app, created an account, onboarded to a “cloud” and configured from my phone.

Oh HP, how you have fallen from the rock-solid days of procurves and have degenerated to the unfortunately named Aruba “Always On”

Rant over.

  • mnvoronin
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    81 year ago

    Do you mean Aruba “Instant On”? If so, you are withholding some important bit of information.

    They are perfectly usable without an app or cloud console. Will get DHCP IP and you can log in to the local web interface and manage it that way. The caveat is that it has to be VLAN1.

    • Kuro
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      21 year ago

      I have two of these switches, and after the first configuration you can also just change the management VLAN, so you can manage them from any VLAN after setting it up once.