Managing the Unmanaged Switch

I'd call the web interface on low-end managed switches a liability [0]. It would be interesting to write one's own 8051 firmware from the ground up [1]. It shouldn't actually be terribly hard to have some basic thing that accepts a binary chip config image from the network, right? The existing 512KiB flash ought to be enough for that. And since Realtek switch chips seem to be so popular, it could even be made generic enough to work across models. Then a user would just need a flash programmer.

My core network is Mikrotik gear with 10Gb uplinks, but it would be nice to use my old unmanaged gbit switches (Netgear GS108 mainly) with vlans rather than going nuts with more Mikrotik or having lots of homeruns.

[0] high-end ones too, for that matter

[1] the alternative I thought of first was setting up an Arduino as an I2C slave. But then you'd also want to switch the switch's power supply, and need an ethernet port on the Arduino just to connect to the switch itself.

> given the price point of these switches when buying new I would highly recommend that you instead look for a used managed Gigabit switch.

Power, power, power .... one of these older gigabit switches is going to use 10x power at idle, compared with one of the crappy and cheapest realtek-based "unmanaged" switches. Which is kinda important for something that is going to be 24h on. And of course since no one reviews these things, you'll only know once you have spend the money.

So if you really can get away with a crappy web interface onto the crappy low-power realtek chip, you may get the best of both worlds.

For slightly less dinky option rtl838x/rtl839x based switches are quite common and relatively cheap. What makes them special is that they are well supported by openwrt

https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/targets/realtek

Cool hack - I have the ‘smart’ managed version of that switch (although the PoE version of it I think), and it looks exactly the same to the unmanaged one - absolutely makes sense that it’s basically identical (just a BOM change for the different flash to fit the larger firmware).

Often it’s way cheaper to have one hardware version and control features in firmware, and that principle is even more true for silicon (same die but fuses that are blown to disable parts of it, or the chip clocked down because it might not perform properly at the speed of the more expensive SKU), so not surprising it’s this way!

Watch out, I'm not sure about the SG108 but the SG108E has a known defect where it incorrectly broadcasts non-VLAN traffic across all ports, regardless of configured VLAN settings. https://community.tp-link.com/en/business/forum/topic/89181

I have confirmed this with my own version 1 SG108E (which additionally can't actually be managed without an ancient version of java and iptables /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward forwarding tricks. https://shred.zone/en/dev/setting-up-tp-link-tl-sg108e-with-...)

I'd say stay far away from this hardware line unless you actually do just want a dumb switch. If you do buy make sure you know exactly what hardware revision you're getting. I've heard the version 5 fixes it.

8051! I love it. Its like running web stacks on these ESP8266's without the crypto acceleration.

But at the same time, we have to stop pretending that 1Gbit Ethernet isn't utterly obsolete in the same way that RS-232 is. Useful maybe for low power, longish reach, but its slower than a good number of internet connections now, and the wifi on the other end too.

Ex: My house, turns out the 1Gbit uplink from the ISP provided hardware to my firewall was causing me to lose 300MB because it was actually provisioned at 1.3Gbit, and when I switched it to 5Gbit, my Wifi got faster.. Ex, I can get in excess of 1Gbit in about 2/3rds of my house now to sites on the internet.

1GbaseT is 27 year old technology this year, 10GbaseT is 20 this year, and by any other computing metric should be obsolete too since there has been a 25GbaseT spec for 10 years that no one has bothered to manufacture. And here in 2026, double or more should be easy with modern phy technology, and with proper line quality could easily be all of dynamic power, dynamic length and dynamic speeds over a range of cable types and length, both running at lower power and higher performance.

In very cost sensitive applications where you want 'managed' and 'cheap' like security cameras for an ordinary house, the best non hack solution I've found is to have something like a basic managed non-PoE switch, and then hang a dumb switch downstream of it for the sole purpose of aggregating something like IP cameras.

For example some of the cheaper unmanaged 8-port 802.3af/at switches with enough power budget for 7 cameras. Average traffic from a single camera isn't a lot, easily fitting in a single 1000BaseT link to the managed switch. Put the whole dumb switch in the camera vlan.