That comment seems a bit jumbled, but yes I have found it frustrating when something is written for Internet Explorer and subsequent versions of IE don’t work. Switch firmware is not immune from this. Fortunately, better companies’ newer products seem to be coming with much more cross-browser compatibility (especially as the last several releases of browsers gain more dynamic features and are a little more standardized in how they are implemented) which also tends to fix the “new browser doesn’t work” issue as a nice little side-effect.

Doesn’t help the old stuff that’s still poorly-written of course. But eventually (and in some churches, eventually is a long time!) this gear will be obsolete and will be replaced. It is a slow cycle.

I mean all that HP strategy called “Fix problems” instead of “Go for the goal”. HP and Microsoft in technical terms are very alike, they both go for money fixing problems. Instead of getting money offering better designed and implemented products. As the result, for example, HP management software can’t run on Microsoft OS because HP did not expect Microsoft to fix new bugs in IE making HP Insight Manager incompatible.

It is bad solution when some problem created by messy network planning is “fixed” by the device that is not supposed to deal with such problems.

Anyway, thank you for the article, now we know what to do if some switch stops switching…

Thanks Michael, that is a good idea, especially in an environment where there is no peer-to-peer connectivity required beyond server access. It would certainly be even more secure than just blocking DHCP. However, my guess is that in a church environment, or at least many I’ve seen, there are enough exceptions where users share directly computer-to-computer that it may not be the best solution for everyone. However, some Church IT folks are looking for ways to limit the often non-authorized direct-sharing, so perhaps server-only access could be a boon as well! I never really thought of using it, but there are a good number of systems I can think of that wouldn’t need access to anything but the uplink port…if I have some spare time I may examine this a bit more myself. Thanks again!

(Note port isolation doesn’t work with VLANs.)

Thanks for the additional details Jeremy!