Sodola SL-8T2XS-WEB Review & Setup Guide

In the video below, we show how to install Ollama and Gemma 4

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After all these years, computers should be on 2.5G, yet managed 2.5G switches have been expensive to find

When I say managed, I’m talking about being able to configure VLANs on the switch as it’s essential to isolate Smart Home/IOT traffic from the rest of your network as security for them tends to be poor

Now brands like Sodola have been making inroads into the budget end of the market

So I bought one of their 8x 2.5G port switches which also has 2 x 10G SFP+ ports to test out

But what features do you get with this switch and how do you configure it?

Management:
Now this switch doesn’t have a console port, so you’ll need to connect to it via a web browser

For new switches I typically remotely connect to a laptop through Wi-Fi and plug that laptop’s Ethernet port to the switch to make my life easier

By default, these switches have a static IP address of 192.168.2.1 so whatever you plug into it will need a IP address in the range of
192.168.2.2 to 192.168.2.25

And a subnet mask of
255.255.255.0

Then you’ll want to open up a web browser and point it to
https://192.168.2.1

Now for me nothing happened, which is concerning

Even running Wireshark this switch wasn’t talking on the network

So I reset the switch back to its factory settings by pressing a paper clip against the reset button in the front and holding it for around 10 seconds

Once all the LEDs lit up, I released the paper clip and shortly after that I could access the switch

There were no signs of tampering when I took this switch out of the box but this does seem odd to me

In any event I was now able to connect to the switch

There is a choice of English or Chinese although if you prefer English, I’ve found it can show Chinese language and then replace that with English or show you both at the same time

Now that doesn’t seem like an ideal method of language translation to me, but in the grand scheme of things, this is a cheap switch and it’s functional

At this stage you’ll want to login with the default name and password of
admin/admin

One warning I’ll give you straight away is make your changes and apply them quickly

This switch has a built-in idle timeout and it is short and as far as I can tell it can’t be changed

So don’t build up multiple changes and then apply them as you’ll likely find you’ll have been logged out and you’ll have to start all over again

System Functions:
The first section you land on is called system functions, which basically covers configuration options for the switch itself

You’ll first see some summary information about the switch and here you can change it’s name if you want

One thing I’ve noticed incidentally is you have to apply changes for them to take affect, but later in the video you’ll see something slightly different going on

Now the switch supports both IPv4 and IPv6 and each has their own page to make changes to that protocol

You can enable DHCP if you like but out of the box it uses static IP settings

Personally I prefer static IP addressing because you could lose access to the switch if you have a DHCP server problem

Only one user account for management is possible and it never pays to keep the default user settings

What I like is you can change the default user name, but it feels a bit confusing

If you select the User page, you’ll want to enter a new username, the existing user password, then add and confirm the new user password

After you click Apply though you’ll be logged out to force you to login with the new account

In small networks, you don’t normally implement redundant links for switching because they don’t have redundant switches for cost reasons

However, this switch does support Loop Protection and that has its own page

By default it’s disabled, but you can enable this on a per-port basis

The idea is, if a known MAC address appears on another port, it usually suggests there’s a bridging loop or MAC spoofing going on and if this feature is enabled on that port, the port may be locked down as a result

The Spanning Tree Protocol is another feature you’ll find even on budget managed switches to protect against bridging loops

This too has its own configuration page and as I usually find it’s disabled by default

If you do want to use it you’ll have to Enable it, select between traditional STP or Rapid STP and then decide which port or ports you want to enable it on

Which of these protocols you select largely depends on what your other switch or switches use

But RSTP is backward compatible with STP and is preferred these days

The remaining Reboot and Restore page lets you restart the switch or restore it back to factory default settings

Bear in mind, neither of these options give you a warning or asks for confirmation

Advanced Settings:
Most of your time will likely be spent in the Advanced Settings section changing port or VLAN settings, although I use the word VLAN loosely as you’ll see

Quite frankly, the port settings page on most switches tends to be used for shutting unused ports for security reasons and opening them back up when needed

Although you can hard code a port’s speed and duplex settings, these days they are best left on auto negotiation. Those sort of of settings go back to the early days of 10Mb and 100Mb links

Interestingly this switch has flow control enabled by default, but if you find it causing problems you can disable it on a per port basis

Bear in mind you can have ports on a lot of different speeds on this switch, ranging from 10Mb to 10G and flow control can help in some ways with an imbalance

But both endpoints have to support flow control for this to work and so too do any switches between them

Now this is where you might notice something different as I alluded to earlier

This is one of a few pages which also have a Save button so after you’ve made a change, click apply and then click save

Whether it’s security or probably troubleshooting, port mirroring can be useful and the switch does have a page for configuring this

Against Port Mirroring you select the destination port where traffic will be forwarded to

For Mirroring Port you select the source port or ports where traffic is being mirrored from

Being able to mirror multiple ports can be quite useful and you can also choose to mirror ingress only, egress only or both

Link aggregation has its own configuration page, and this is used to bundle multiple links together for redundancy or just increased bandwidth

Typically on a small switch like this you might connect a server to two ports then bundle them together to give the server maybe 2G of bandwidth or 5G depending on the speed. But that’s the overall bandwidth. Each conversation or flow will be limited to using one switch port so the reality is maybe two separate connections at 1G and not one at 2G

Logically you can create up to 16 bundles, but there aren’t enough ports on this switch to do that

The default setting is Static meaning there is no LAG, so to create a bundle you’ll either select LAG, which is to create a static bundle, or LACP to create a dynamic bundle using the Link Aggregation Control Protocol

Whichever method you use you’ll want to assign the relevant ports to the same aggregation group and make sure the device at the other end is using the same method

LACP does have one extra setting in this switch and that’s the LACP timeout. Short means 3 seconds and long 90 seconds, and this needs to match on both sides

There is also an LACP system priority you can set. Unless there’s a particular need for one switch to be the decider you can let them agree amongst themselves, otherwise the lower this number is the better

As an aside, only switches that support MLAG or multi-chassis LAG allow you to create redundant aggregation links and it’s usually only found in higher end Enterprise grade switches

In the case of this type of switch, a server with two links for instance would need them both connecting to this switch to benefit from LAG

Now at this point things can get confusing when it comes to configuring VLANs because this switch is very different compared to the traditional concept of VLAN management

The switch has two configuration pages, one is Port VLAN, the other Tagged VLAN

The port VLAN page is where I’d consider access ports are configured, the tagged VLAN page is for trunk ports

I’ll start with tagged VLANs first as to me it makes more sense if you’re coming from a networking background or just used to other vendor switches

Trunk ports in the networking realm are used when the port will carry traffic belonging to multiple VLANs

These can be switch to switch as well as switch to server and to keep the traffic separated, each VLAN is assigned an ID, usually something from 1 to 4094

This switch doesn’t really use a typical 802.1Q design, instead you’ll find you can assign Bridge IDs ranging from 0 to 63

Let’s say you connect port 5 of this Sodola switch to an 802.1Q supporting switch and that’s using VLANs 100, 200 and 300 that you want to use on this switch as well

In the tagged VLAN page, you’d select a bridge port from the list and configure it to translate between a VLAN on the other switch and a bridge ID on this switch

In this example we could do the following
Enable BP_17, Port 5, Bridge ID 1, External VLAN 100
Enable BP_18, Port 5, Bridge ID 2, External VLAN 200
Enable BP_19, Port 5, Bridge ID 3, External VLAN 300

This is another page requiring you to click apply as well as save by the way

NOTE: This is one of those pages where it would be easy to configure lots of lines, then click apply only to find you’ve been logged out and your choices lost. So I think configuring one line at a time is a safer decision

Not many networks use QinQ, so the default setting of single tagging (SglTag) should be fine for most

Now although there is an Internal VLAN option, it remains greyed out on this switch because the switch uses bridge IDs instead so I suspect its from code intended for other switches

Basically what those settings I’ve defined mean are we’ve turned port 5 into a trunk port that supports bridge ID 1, 2 and 3 which correspond to VLANs 100, 200 and 300 respectively

What you may notice though, is although the external VLAN ranges from 1 to 4094, you’re limited to a bridge ID of 0 to 63. So unless you’re willing to intermix VLANs, this switch is limited to supporting 64 VLANs

Personally I’d prefer to avoid bridge ID 0

In the 802.1Q world, VLAN 1 should be reserved for system use only and so we’re advised to use anything but VLAN 1 for our own use

Bridge ID 0 looks to be similar but you can only connect to the switch’s management interface from bridge ID 0

And you can’t assign the management interface of this switch to another bridge ID so if you want remote access to the switch you’ll need to somehow connect into Bridge ID 0 remotely

Now I did try mapping a tagged VLAN to bridge ID 0, as the page allows you to do that, but it knocked my firewall off the network as it led to problems for CARP

I’m still trying to find the cause let alone a solution, but I’ve found if you assign an untagged VLAN to the trunk on the upstream switch and set that as the PVID, you will get a mapping to bridge ID 0 if you leave the physical port on the Sodola side on a default setting of bridge ID 0

Now when it comes to access ports i.e. ports you plug a typical endpoint into that don’t support VLANs, you’ll need to make configuration changes on the port VLAN page

This is much simpler because you enter the bridge ID corresponding to what you configured in the tag VLAN page

So if for instance I wanted a computer on port 2 to be part of VLAN 100, I’d enter bridge ID 1

The Discard option is a security feature mainly to block devices from tagging packets when they shouldn’t

So if this is an access port and the computer should not be VLAN aware, it would make sense to enable the option to discard tagged traffic

Now, if that all went over your head and you only want to use this single switch then you can ignore the Tagged VLAN page

Instead, on the Port VLAN page you could do something like this

You could assign ports 2 and 3 to bridge ID 5 for instance and those two computers could talk to each other

You could assign ports 6 and 7 to bridge ID 10 and those two computers could talk to each other

But what’s important is the computer on port 2 can’t talk to the one on port 6 and vice versa because they belong to different bridge IDs

Regardless, any changes you make on this page need you to click apply and save

Now if you have computers on your network using multicasting then there is some basic support for that on the IGMP Snooping page

First you’ll need to enable it by clicking the IGMP Configuration button and enabling the IGMP Switch option

This allows the switch to listen in on the IGMP traffic that multicast typically involves and then it can learn which ports to send multicast traffic to rather than the default option which is to send it to every port in the bridge ID

The Fast Leave option was a later addition to multicasting allowing devices to immediately leave a multicast group rather than relying on polling, so it’s useful to enable this

The IGMP Snooping Querier option is for more sophisticated multicast networks when you want to control a dedicated device handling all of the IGMP queries

One you click Confirm the changes take affect

Once this is enabled you’ll also be able to add and delete static multicast groups if you like

Do remember to click save though to save the configuration

The last page in this section is one for Storm Control

If there’s an attacker on the network or even a device with a rogue network card for instance, this is a feature that can prevent a device overwhelming the network with broadcast, multicast and unknown unicast traffic

It allows you to impose a switch wide limit on how much of that traffic can be accepted

Unfortunately this switch doesn’t give you a per port option for Storm Control and you can’t set different settings for these different traffic types

You’ll need to enable it, set a limit in Mbps then click apply

What that limit is depends on your network. You need to monitor it for a while to find the baseline for these types of traffic and set a value slightly above that level

Set it too low though and some computers may have problems. Too high and it doesn’t achieve anything

WARNING: If you disable the feature it reverts the storm control rate down to 0, so if you ever re-enable it make sure to set the correct limit you want or you could run into issues

Status Information:
For monitoring we have the Status Information section

The Port Statistics pages give you the typical information about if ports are active or not, their bandwidth, packet counts as well as errors

The Static MAC page can be useful as it allows you to add static entries into the switches MAC table

This can be quite useful because if a MAC address is learned by a switch but the device doesn’t send much traffic, after a while the switch removes it from its MAC table

If another computer then tries to send traffic to that MAC address the switch doesn’t know which port to send it to so it floods it out all ports

Adding a static entry prevents that flooding behaviour is useful because it stops other devices having to waste CPU cycles checking traffic that isn’t meant for them

But it’s also good for security because other devices could be blocked from spoofing a known MAC address

And since traffic isn’t flooded out every port, traffic only goes where it genuinely should

Do remember to save the configuration though if you add or removed any entries

The Dynamic MAC page in contrast shows MAC addresses the switch has learned, what bridge port this was on and bridge ID it was in, together with how long is left before it will time out if not refreshed

This is extremely useful, particularly when you need to troubleshoot issues and have to track down which port a device is on

System Tools:
The last section is System Tools

The configuration page allows you to download the existing configuration by clicking Download, choosing a location, entering a file name then clicking Save

NOTE: Some web browsers may block the file from being downloaded and you’ll need to release this for it to be actually saved

If you want to upload a configuration you’ll want to click Select File, navigate to and select the configuration file you want then select Open

To complete the process you’ll need to click the Upload button and then reboot the switch for the changes to take affect

Similar to the Configuration page is the Firmware page

It has the same download and upload process, however, I didn’t find any firmware for this switch
https://www.sodola-network.com/pages/firmware-updated-for-sodola-managed-switch

At the time of recording this switch is on version 1.0.0.6 and the support team have said there is no newer firmware available

Summary:
Now, I’ve yet to fully put this switch through its paces but I thought a video about its configuration would be useful given how this doesn’t use typical 802.1Q VLANs

And there are other channels out that that test things like port throughput and power consumption

What appeals to me about this switch is it has 2x 10G SFP+ ports and 8x 2.5G ports, so in theory it should fit in nicely with my goal to upgrade to 2.5G

It is a fanless switch, so 10G fibre will be better as it generates less heat, and also draws less power

And a 10G uplink will be ideal for those computers I have which now support 2.5G

And as Wi-Fi and Internet links creep above 1G, this seems like a cost effective way for me to test out this brand of switches