At the moment I have my home network (192.168.0.0/24) like as below (all connect using straight cables):

Cable Modem (TV room)
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Netgear Wireless/Wired (TV room)
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Switch1-dumb (TV room)
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Switch2-dumb (Bedroom)
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Switch3-dumb (Basement)

My Cisco lab equipment are in the basement all connecting to an access server which at the
moment is plugged into Switch3-dumb (along with a printer & NAS)

What I'm thinking is to replace the Switch3-dumb with a 3550 I'll be picking up later this week.
Then using this to do as the Switch3-dumb did maybe by creating a native 'vlan 192' & putting
it into a gig interface which will connect to the network using the straight cable, also putting the printer
& NAS into the same vlan.
This will hopefully still give me connectivity throughout.

Then when required I'll like to use the 3550 with the rest of my Cisco equipment for setting up
different labs (segmenting them from the home network by using different vlans etc.

One of my reasons to implement the 3550 into the home network is to be able to play about on
a regular basis (port monitor, traffic stats, etc).

Anyway if anyone has done this kinda thing or has any ideas to better this or foresee any
problems (loops, storms) I would love to hear about them

tia

I have a 3560 in my network at home. It works fine.
Small things I've noticed:
- Some switches, notable these inside consumer grade routers, pass LLDP and/or CDP, while others don't.
- Despite this being the only switch running spanning-tree, plan accordingly. A Windows 7 with two network cards in bridging my (e.g. Loopback and physical NIC for connecting GNS3 to the network) will send STP frames. Adapt priority of the switch, use BPDU Guard. Although no ports will be blocked when the computer does gain root bridge status.

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Thanks for the reply & good point about running two nics on a client I'll bear that in mind.