When we installed our Cisco VoIP system over a year ago, we purchased the entry-level Cisco Catalyst Expresses.  I must say that we made a wretched mistake.  The old saying of pay now or pay later does play true in this case.

Today, I was forced to deal with Spanning Tree Protocol errors across the main core switches, therefore, cutting off access to the users to the entire network.  The issue with these cheap switches is there is only a web-based gui and no console, so if your network goes down, you have no way to gain access to the error messages.  Beyond that, in our case, with STP, we cannot see which port the error is on or what MAC address is causing the issue.

So after a largely frustrating day with no idea of what is causing the fluctuations of up and down, I regret our purchase of low-end switches and will hope to slowly at least replace all core switches with 3560’s or higher. I’ll start digging into it more tomorrow on an off-day.

If anyone has any ideas, do let me know.  How many others have done the buy cheap now and had to pay for it later?