I have to admit, I have been spoiled or lived in a box not sure which. I have been a Unix Admin for years but most of the time I have been called in to do jobs or handle crisis situations it wasn't because of the networking infrastructure and most of the places had networking teams that dealt with the network side. Since I am now part of a team that is deploying numerous AIX boxes along with the infrastructure that entails, include networking switches, firewalls, loadbalancers.

I am now learning some cisco networking at work. Being the geek that I am, I decided to take my job home and get some Cisco gear at home. As you can see from my previous post. Luckily I ordered two switches, the nicer of the two arrived 2 days ago and is actually what. I ordered a Cisco Catylst 2950.

Now the question becomes do I order a pair of 2924's because I have heard from Cisco guys that to really understand spanning tree, you need 3 switches, this is the cheap option, or do I order another 2950 so I can do fast port spanning tree?

I would love to get some cisco gear that has more than 2 gigabit ports but that stuff is way out of my price range, I would need executive sign off ( my wife would have to agree ) to spend that kind of money, and I really can't justify it. But Now I am starting to get a lot of more modern hardware, that would love to be gigabit connected, Sun Ultra 20, Sun Blade 1500, and the latest a Sun Blade 1000. Not to mention a work laptop, a Beige box amd athlon 5200+ (solaris 10 ZFS/XEN box ) and my son's new laptop, and too many 100mbit devices to count from Sun sparcstation 5's to SGI workstations, Ultra 2's and Sunrays. Of course I have a 8 port unmanaged gigabit switch that is getting close to full and in the living room and a fore 2810 managed 10/100 switch, up to now I just had a couple cables from to the machine room where most of the older stuff lives. Now I feel I need to add a gigabit to the machine room, of course It would be awesome if I could get two managed gigabit switches and do ehterchannel/trunking between the two switches.

Does anyone have recomendations for low cost managed gigabit switches, I hear the HP procurve switches are nice? Not sure how nicely they play with cisco switches but I'm sure they must work together okay.