HP ProCurve Switch 2524 J4813A - Putting it into Action, Testing
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As I mentioned earlier, the switch can be hooked up to a computer via the RS232 serial port. Once you have done that, you can connect to the switch via some telnet utility. The User Guide contains the necessary information regarding how to do this, including some step-by-step instructions if the default telnet apps are used for Windows. In the screen shot below, we're using a stand-alone Tera Term Pro terminal application.
The switch needs to configure before you place it in action right in the middle of a network. You should specify the IP address (if manual) or let the DHCP lease one. It's advised to set the password, its name, sand subnet mask, if need be.
Assuming that you have specified a static IP address, you can always reach the Web Configuration Panel of the switch via any web browser (Java must be supported). You can access the switch by typing its IP address into the URL textbox. After you supply the necessary information (password) you can access a somewhat fancy inner configuration panel. There's much to do there; it's a replacement for the telnet part.
With the telnet application you can only do the preliminary configurations, which let you access the switch's web interface. Once you reach the switch's setup interface with the web browser, lots of monitoring and testing functions are also supported, along with advanced and extensive configurations.
In the screen shots above you can see the fancy graphs covering the use of the ports (each barely uses a few percent via Unicast streaming; blue stands for Unicast). In the first screen shot, the close-up view of the switch is also reported. As you can see, the green ports are being used. In our case, these are 1-11 and 13-18. And no extra transceivers are used (XCVR 25 and XCVR 26). Below you can see a quick Ping Test (10 times).
The aforementioned Ping Test is part of the web interface as well, along with other utilities. You can also get the switch to report its system information, as you can see on the screen shot attached below. It's been hooked up in our network for more than six days at the time of writing this review. No additional cons and/or issues were noticed.
The bandwidth across the computers hooked up via the switch was really great. In our configuration we've been using 100mbps Full Duplex 100BASE-TX connections via straight cabling, but as with every other switch nowadays, they work just fine with both crossover and straight-through cabling. During our quick tests within our network, all of the devices and computers behaved excellently.
Bandwidth tests were omitted because the network in which the switch was tested is quite complex and the results couldn't be interpreted objectively. And neither was it possible to set up a temporary test network because the switch was required by the network.
Next: Conclusions >>
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