Support for other switches

[CJBuchel]

The Cisco lineup works well enough for the application, but the old 3560G is long out of service. This along with it needing to be purchased second hand makes it a bit of a shot in the dark, at least in my area, I can never find 2 of the same models for redundancy or ease of mind. (Often times these switches come out of datacenters and may have been pushed fairly hard in their lifetime). And buying new cisco switches is not very cost effective or valuable for what you get.

Other similar models work fairly well with some tweaking (i.e, we use a set of 3750G's) but requires a fair amount of reconfiguring. And on rare occasions, modifications to the Go code. In our case, it was just a tweak to the config script. But due to Cisco shenanigans, it also runs on older firmware, with no easy way of updating the firmware to something later, i.e v15.0 used in the cheesy configuration.

Recently I've thought more and more about trying to get different switches to work, like TP-Link and Ubiquity which can be bought new for a reasonable price with modern hardware and software, fairly easily upgradible and in the case of Unify, also managable through a controller. In our case Unify products seem to work well for our needs, as we have a few Unify AP's for team internet and admin/FMS networking. And a dream machine for the gateway, also acting as the unify controller for site management. Which makes quick venue setups fairly easy to configure all the networking at the start of the day, without needing to individually touch the switches or ap's scattered around the venue. Especially for changes during the event.

In the coming months I was going to play around and see if I could integrate the Unify API into cheesy
https://ubntwiki.com/products/software/unifi-controller/api
Unify switches also have the same SSH style as cisco, but it seems more flexible to use the top layer API from the controller, and with the Radio now using an API, having the switch also using an API just seems nice to abstract away the nitty gritty.

It got me thinking that it would be nice to see officially in Cheesy as well, perhaps a dropdown for the type of switch/networking in the setup page to allow for different support.

Curious on the thoughts about it, I'll be trying it out in my own spare time for Unify. But I thought I'd chuck it down as a Feature request/Issue.