Adding Switch to Cisco Home Lab - Part 2

Configuring VLANs

I'll start the configuration of adding switch to my Cisco home lab by configuring the switch first. At the previous tutorial series, I posted about how to connect Cisco router to cable internet, and now here's how the network will look like again when added a switch to it:

The network will have 4 VLANs, with the VLAN 5 acting as the native VLAN.
By default, the native VLAN of Cisco switches is VLAN 1, you might want to change the native VLAN from VLAN 1 to other VLAN since there a security concern about this.

You can read a nice article about native VLAN security concern from cisco.

In 2950 switches, you have to type in these commands to create VLANs:

C2950> enable
C2950# configure terminal
C2950 (config)# vlan 5
C2950 (config-vlan)# name MANAGEMENT
C2950 (config-vlan)# vlan 10
C2950 (config-vlan)# name OFFICE
C2950 (config-vlan)# vlan 20
C2950 (config-vlan)# name HOME
C2950 (config-vlan)# vlan 30
C2950 (config-vlan)# name WIRELESS

You can verify that you successfully created the VLANs by issuing this command:

C2950# show vlan

Now to set the VLAN 5 as the native VLAN and assign it to be the native VLAN, we should do this:

C2950 (config)# interface VLAN 5
C2950 (config-if)# ip address 192.168.5.2 255.255.255.0
C2950 (config-if)# no shutdown

By issuing the no shutdown command, the VLAN 1 will be automatically shutdown and replaced by the VLAN 5.
Assigning an IP address to the VLAN other than VLAN 1 will make that VLAN as management VLAN so your switch can be accessible for configuration using telnet.
You can only alter the Native VLAN from VLAN 1 to other VLAN but you can't delete the VLAN 1.

Next thing you need to do is assigning those VLANs to the switch's ports.