My Brocade FCX 648S-HPOE arrived from eBay yesterday.
See I have a homelab setup I'm cobbling together and a mission to train a door to recognize and block my neighbor's cat from entry. Her name is Aria and she pisses everywhere then eats the cat food. I have 3 cats that require free use of the cat door, and if its closed they piss everywhere.
I've been scheming about how to do this for quite some time. The basic idea would be to install a magnetic lock on the cat door, and actuate it over an MTQQ triggered relay. But how to trigger it? My cats refuse to wear collars and their microchips weren't readable within usable proximity. Enter https://frigate.video/ this summer. Its a self-hosted NVR that can be trained to recognize arbitrary objects and fire off events when objects are detected, including to MQTT. It looked like a viable project, and I've been trying to get some camera system anyways for minding the front door while I work from a distant basement- but I haven't been willing to join the Ring panopticon just yet.
Over the past few months I've been acquiring the required hardware from eBay. I overpaid for a Google Coral USB TPU, and got a steal on a pair of their recommended cameras, Loryta IPC-T5442TM-AS-LED unused from a commercial install job. Unfortunately they are POE only, or a propriety 12VDC. I know I was going to need POE eventually anyhow, and while my Mikrotik RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD has a single POE port I would need more - and I wasn't able to get even that port working for one reason or another. So I found a Brocade FCX 648S-HPOE for $50. Overkill? Most definitely. I thought there would be no harm, and it would give me an opportunity to work with serious gear and improve my networking acumen. It is as loud as a laundry machine I swear.
Unfortunately its so serious that I need to go find an RS-232 cable to enable web management - until then it drops all links. So I still haven't been able even fire up the cameras. If my foraging through the cable bins again proves fruitless, then I'm going to their drive around town or find one online and wait until the next weekend...
So that Best Buy home equipment sounds kinda nice right now.
The Brocade FCX 648S-HPOE has is a stackable switch with forty four 10/100/1000 Mbps ports plus four Combo ports, which include four 10/100/1000 Mbps RJ45 ports and four 100/1000 Mbps SFP ports. The switch has two management interfaces, a DB9 serial port (Console) on the front panel and an RJ45 port (Out-of-band Management Interface) on the rear panel
There’s more to switching than Bestbuy home equipment. I was going to say Netgear, but even they offer some layer 3 switches I think.