Trunk port needs to be tagged or untagged?

Question

I linking 2 different brand of switches (Linksys & Zyxel) through SPF gigabit connector.

g4 1G-Combo-F Full 1000 Enabled Off Up Disabled Off

It says the link is up but I still unable to reach the 2nd switch through the uplink (no other cable plugged into it yet, if I just link it with an ethernet cable on any other port it works). I know a lot of things can go wrong here so I would like to start with the beginning.

Both switches have 7 different vlans defined manually with the exact same vlan IDs.

Do the Trunk ports needs to be tagged or untagged on both switches?

Solution

Do the Trunk ports needs to be tagged or untagged on both switches?

Tagged.

Ports connected to devices that aren't VLAN-aware need to be untagged. Typically this would be your user-facing ports.

Comments

[joeqwerty]

1. What brand of switches are you using? 2. When you say you're unable to reach the 2nd switch, what do you mean? Do you mean a host connected to the 1st switch can't communicate with a host connected to the second switch? 3. Regardless of switch brand, frames transiting the trunk link need to be tagged with the VLAN ID of the VLAN they came from in order to reach a port in the same VLAN on the other switch. In a Cisco switch this is called trunking. In an HP switch this is called tagging.

[heroes222]

Zyxel GS1510, Linksys SRW224G4 and when I say it's not working that means that from my computer (which is connected to the 1. switch) I cannot ping the management ip of the 2nd switch which is linked. I don't have any devices plugged into the 2nd switch yet. If I plug in a regular ethernet cable between switch 1 and 2 then I'm able to reach the 2nd switches management interface. If you can give me any advice what should be the next step in this debugging process that would be helpful. Thanks!

[joeqwerty]

These two statements seem to contradict each other. Are the switches connected to each other? If so, how? 1. I cannot ping the management ip of the 2nd switch which is linked. 2. If I plug in a regular ethernet cable between switch 1 and 2 then I'm able to reach the 2nd switches management interface.

[heroes222]

25-26 are the UPLINK SFP ports: if I connect the 2 switches through the uplink, the 2nd is unreachable, if I connect them through a regular port then it works tinypic.com/r/312wdqt/8

[joeqwerty]

Do the SFP interfaces show as being UP?

[heroes222]

Yes as I wrote at the beginning. Looking from the first switch, the uplink port is up: g4 1G-Combo-F Full 1000 Enabled Off Up Disabled Off