Review on 💻 Zyxel GS1900-8HP: Smart Managed Gigabit PoE+ Switch - 8 Ports, 70 Watt Budget, VLAN, IGMP, QoS by Dylan Deng

Revain sent me a Zyxel GS1900-16 instead of a GS1900-8HP, not just once, but twice. On my third order of 8HP I received the correct block. It is durable and well made. Very durable metal case. The device itself is small, but the power adapter is BIG. Too large. Spring. You remove 2 Phillips screws to open the case. The electronics appear to be of high quality with no obvious quality control issues. There are NO instructions. There is no paper manual included, just a quick start guide with basic cable connection diagrams to get you connected. Not many setup instructions other than the default IP address 192.168.1.1. Zyxel has a pretty good .pdf documentation with all the settings and stuff on their website. Their YouTube videos are pretty good too. But just the connection to the web interface was difficult because you don't automatically get an IP address. This switch cannot use DHCP. So to get a local IP address you need to change the network settings to point to the client's local IP address on the same subnet as the switch's default IP address (192.168.1.1), which you should be able to do Be sure to leave the Default Gateway and DNS fields blank while configuring the client's network settings to connect to the switch for the first time. Or connect the switch to a router or gateway that assigns IP addresses. If your router has a default IP address of 192.168.1.1 then the router or switch needs a different local IP address because they cannot be the same but they are the default address. Once I figured out how to properly connect to the web interface, and once I got used to it myself, remembering to "save" the settings so they persist across reboots (or reboot without saving if something goes wrong, revert to the previous good config ), the rest of the setup was easy. This is my first network switch so it's pretty easy considering I'm new to networking. The firmware is more or less intuitive and seems to have all the necessary features, although I've never delved into the settings of a managed switch. Make sure you update the firmware immediately as I believe it comes with an old version that has been updated to fix security issues. So it is very important to install this new update! I haven't connected any PoE cameras yet, but I'm sure that won't be a problem. The speeds are FAST. I can see a slight increase in latency as you might expect as I add a transition between the client and the modem, although I'm wondering if there are any settings I could change to mitigate the tiny increase in latency, that I see (Do I need DNS servers listed on the switch or does it always depend on my router settings?) Maybe I have a little misconfiguration for example. Securely manage my home network + surveillance camera system. If I can understand VLAN and get it working then this switch would be a great buy! So far so good, wish me luck! This crap isn't that easy to figure out.