Snow

There’s currently a lot of very pretty snow around here. 

I especially like the funny shapes the wind has created at one corner of the house.

New computer case…

Mini-ITX in wooden box.

Country Selection Fail

  Georgia, Germany, Ghana, …?

VLANs on a cheap switch

Today I read on tmbinc’s blog about how he modified a cheap Ethernet-switch to be VLAN capable.

With VLANs you can fan out the single built-in Ethernet-interface of your computer to several isolated networks. These cheap switches (you can get them with 8 ports for about 10€) have this functionality because they use the same chips as common plastic routers that separate their three different types of network ports with the same technique and usually connect with a ninth MII-port that’s not being used in a common desktop-switch.

I had tried to do the same in the past, but initially failed as I blew the serial i2c-eeprom during my attempts of programming it, but today I didn’t make any mistakes that destroyed the little thing. As my configuration is different from tmbinc’s, I’ll make it also available in the archive linked to below.

The Process to make your switch (that has to use a RTL8309SB IC) VLAN capable.

1. Get a switch that preferably already has a I2C eeprom to store it’s configuration. Mine had, because it advertised QOS (quality of service) functionality that requires the IC it to be configured by some external memory. I used a Longshine LCS-FS6108, but it’s already 4 years old, so most likely they’ve switched to a different IC already? One never knows.
2. Remove the I2C eeprom. On that particular switch the ground planes are very thick so I wasn’t able to desolder it properly. I just cut off the pins and…
3. Put it on top of a IC socket providing replacements for the severed limbs.
4. Change the contents of the eeprom using your favorite programmer, the text files in the archive linked to below contain some explanations (see details.txt)
5. Put chip back into switch.

The configuration in the .zip-file provides you with 6 untagged ports and 2 tagged ports according to the table below:

Label on Switch	RTL8309SB Port Number	VLANs
8,7	0,1	1, untagged
6,5	2,3	2, untagged
4,3	4,5	3, untagged
2,1	6,7	1…9, tagged
-	MII	Unused

Download Configuration:

20100106_switch_eeprom_vlan.zip (798k)

• switch_eeprom_vlan.dat : VLAN Configuration of Switch, copy contents to eeprom
• switch_eeprom_orig.dat : Original configuration of Switch, Backup
• switch_eeprom_detail.txt : VLAN Configuration with comments
• switch_eeprom_detail.pdf : VLAN Configuration with comments, as pdf

I tested the switch with a Linux machine that has a NVIDIA nForce Gigabit Controller and my OpenSolaris NAS that uses a RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller.

Update 2011-02-18: zip-file available again on new server

Random stuff happening…