2009/3/26 nate <centos@linuxpowered.net>

Luke S Crawford wrote:
> Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@gmail.com> writes:
>> If you get a service contract on any piece of Cisco equipment, you
>> typically get download access to all of the firmware updates.
>
> Yeah, but the problem for me is that for my frontend network, 100M is just
> fine. A used cisco 3548 is going to set me back around $200. For my
> frontend,
> it looks like a fine switch (my only question is... will it handle IPv6?
> it does vlan tunneling so worst case I use a linux box to route my IPv6.)
> Getting access to firmware updates is 5x that, every year.

I suspect if you keep the switch in layer 2 mode IPv6 will work
just fine, but I wouldn't expect IPv6 layer 3 support from the
switch(so don't expect it to be able to act as a router for your
IPv6 network, and you may need a separate IPv4 network to manage
the switch over IP)

It might work but I wouldn't expect it to.

A 3548 is only layer 2 anyway, i.e. ethernet switching, i.e. below IP... A model sometimes confused with the 3548 is the 3550-48, the 48x100M member of the 3550 series that replaced the 3500 series and as such the 3548, which does have layer 3 functionality in the EMI releases, it's pretty good too with wire speed forwarding even when using some of the layer 3 featureset... But, it won't do any layer 3 IPv6 stuff as some of the tricks used to get the speed include having certain functions done with dedicated silicon which can't cope with IPv6 and of course can't be upgraded with firmware (some versions of firmware have claimed some IPv6 support, but, I've not seen any success with it)

d