Bruscolini.

The Linksys SRW208 is an affordable 8-port Fast Ethernet switch with VLAN and QoS support.

It’s been designed for use in small businesses or home environments and the typical user doesn’t need to be a networking expert. In fact, the website says: “Simplified, web based user management for more intelligent networking“, i.e. “the web interface won’t let you do lots of useful but complicated things.” In addition, Internet Explorer seems to be a requirement as some IE-specific JavaScript library functions are used by the configuration interface.

A console menu-based interface is also available (via ssh with a 512-bit key), but with fewer options than the web-based one (e.g. you can’t define VLANs). How to improve this situation? Just follow these steps:

1. Make a ssh connection to the switch.
2. Authenticate yourself.
3. Press Ctrl-Z
4. Type lcli at the prompt, then press Enter.

Et voilà! You now have access to a full-featured Cisco-like CLI, with many more features than the limited set you’re offered by the web and official interfaces.

This seems to be a “bug” in the menu-based interface, so it may well be possible that future revisions won’t allow the user to escape from it.

Thanks to Renzo for this useful trick.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 and is filed under Posts in English, Truccacci, Zeri e uni. Its tags are: cisco, cli, interface, linksys, srw208, switch, vlan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.