FInally broke the code on the Vlan setup

Well, leave it to me to become confused about how to use my managed switches.  I own three Netgear GS108Ts and use them throughout my house in an effort to manage my home network.  These are a little overkill but I got them because I had this great idea about setting up multiple Vlans throughout the house and I wanted to learn a little more about configuring level 2 switches.  The problem was, up until this last weekend I really didn't have enough time to sit down and configure a "true" vlan using the boxes.  The main difficulty was figuring out how to mix untagged ports and tagged trunk lines throughout the house.  It turns out that I was reading the instructions wrong.  Yes, you heard that, I actually read instructions from time to time.

The GS108T instructions are a little vague on how to set up ports as tagged and untagged on isolated vlans.  I needed to set up ports between two managed switches with a trunk line, i.e. the packets were 802.1Q tagged, with packets going in opposite directions on the same physical ethernet line.  My problem centered around understanding what the instructions were saying, not that they are bad instructions, it's just that they left out some details or someone assumed that the user would automatically know what to do.  I am learning how to use the product correctly.  I found out that you needed to set up the ports on either side of the trunk line in the following manner:

1. you need to set the T on each of the vlans that you want to appear as tagged on the port; the vlan numbers should be the same on either switch.
2. on the PVID screen you need to set the acceptable frame types as "VLAN only" instead of "Admit All"; this forces the port to discard any untagged packets that appear
3. on the PVID screen ignore the PVID field for the trunk port; this was not clear in the documentation
4. on the PVID screen leave the ingress filtering to "Disable" as the opposite drops tagged packets that are not the id in the PVID field; since you can only have one number in the PVID field, this would not be a good choice (not clear in the documentation)

Ports that are not trunk ports, but are untagged members of the same vlan are configured as follows:

1. you need to have a U on each of the ports represented with the vlan that you want to recieve/transmit on; note that only one vlan should be present on the untagged ports to isolate the vlan from others; this is not true of the tagged ports
2. on the PVID screen change the PVID field to be the vlan number that you wish to have on the port
3. on the PVID screen leave the acceptable frame types to "Admit All" for the untagged port; this will ensure that the incoming packets will be destined for the specific vlan mentioned in the PVID field
4. on the PVID screen leave the ingress filtering to "Disable" on the untagged port; this will ensure that the rules in 802.1Q are followed for the port

Well, at least I feel better now that I can have isolated vlans running throughout the house.  If I need to move data between them, I will setup some routers to perform that function.