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.

  • signofzeta
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    1 year ago

    Wow. That’s awful. You’d think it would just let traffic pass stupidly.

    That being said, I’m from the UniFi camp, so I’m used to adopting hardware. Still, if you’re not expecting it, especially in a DR scenario… ugh.

    • gsrfan01@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Instant on can usually be configured locally on the device, it may not do any switching until it knows which deployment type you intend to use.