The unit has two screws holding the top lid in place. Slots for wall-mounting screws are also provided. Note the outlines for the self-adhesive rubber feet which have not yet been fitted.
#Tp link 5 port fast ethernet switch for mac serial#
The underside has a label with some product information and the unique serial number/MAC of the unit. The other sides are not used, except for some ventilation holes. The rear of the unit has the barrel jack for power supply, a slot for a Kensington lock and a reset button. A power LED is provided on the right side as well. The design of the switch is so that all the Ethernet cables cone in fron the front, with link speed and activity lights integrated into each jack. Unlike some of their older products, the rear of the casing does not have the brand moulded into it. The included switchmode power supply is rated 9V 0.6A, as is common with most of TP-Link’s products. The switch also has a bag of self-adhesive rubber feet included, so “some assembly is necessary”. Under the flap is the mini-CD of resources, installation guide and switch in a protective plastic bag.įor Australia, it seems a separate warranty statement is also included. Under the cardboard outer wrap, is a plain inner flip-open cardboard box. The sides give more information about features, and makes it clear that the box includes the switch, a power adapter, installation guide and resource CD. The particular unit I have is a “Ver 3.0” unit with part number 1731500017. The underside has the system requirements, which seems to suggest the configuration utility only runs under Windows, but the switch can be administered through the web interface which should work on almost anything. The rear provides a blurb about the capabilities of the unit – again, with switches, it’s almost like reading the back of a shampoo bottle. Interestingly, the top right corner has a logo indicating “Business Solution”, which also suggests that this is a more “sophisticated” product. The front of the box shows the product clearly along with some of its features in icon form.
Unlike the cheaper plastic switches which I reviewed earlier, the Easy Smart switch seems to have an air of “premium” about it with a foiled-colour outer cardboard wrap, proclaiming a 3-year warranty which is pretty standard. While on the outside, it shares a visual similarity with the metal-cased TL-SG105 “regular” switch, this one also offers a number of additional capabilities of which VLAN operation is one of them. In this article, I will look at the TP-Link TL-SG105E 5-Port Gigabit “Easy Smart” Switch which I managed to obtain on discount for AU$39.20 including postage.
Luckily, this under-served market segment has seen several vendors enter – providing “smart” switches which aren’t much more expensive than traditional “dumb” switches while offering some of the capabilities that much more expensive models do. One could always jury-rig their own from a Linux box with a few NICs or an old router supported by DD-WRT/OpenWRT/etc or invest in some rather cost-efficient Mikrotik gear but this is still somewhat overkill. Traditionally, this would be quite an expensive proposition, as smart-switches were traditionally the realm of business networking with choices mostly from big-name vendors costing several hundred dollars at the least. But as some more “basic” edge equipment may not be able to tag/untag packets to participate in VLANs, while others can’t really be trusted to maintain a fixed VLAN tag setting and avoid VLAN hopping, it actually makes sense to enforce the VLAN tagging as a function of the network infrastructure instead of configuring it at the edge. I’ve made a few mentions about VLANs in the recent past as it’s something that I find quite useful along with virtual APs with managing an ever-increasingly-complex home network.
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