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ZyXEL ES-1552 - removing ports from the default VLAN

Edit: As of January 2015 the ES-1552 has been discontinued.

The ZyXEL ES-1552 is a 48 port 10/100 switch that's become horrifically good value recently, at the time of writing Ebuyer has it in stock for £27 (including delivery.) (Sorry, it's now out of stock and discontinued.) Granted, it's not gigabit, but still - a fully managed, fanless 48 port switch at that price? (And actually, it does have 2 gigabit ports included, so it's really a 50 port switch, and 52 if you include the two SFP slots. Anyway, I digress.)

However, one of the downsides I keep seeing mentioned is that the web interface annoyingly doesn't let you remove ports from the default VLAN, even when the PVID of that port is set to a different VLAN! This would make it practically useless in a VLAN setting, but fortunately there's an easy workaround which I'll document here.

I'll be using Chrome here, but any other browser with similar developer functionality should work just as well. For demo purposes, I'll be removing port 4 from the default VLAN. This may seem a bit long-winded, but it's really rather quick once you've done it for the first time.

So without further ado:


  1. Fire up Chrome and plug in the switches' address, and log in.
  2. Make sure you have at least one other VLAN - if you need to, create a second. (This is trivial, just click on "VLAN" in the left hand menu, click "Create new VLAN" and give it an id.)
  3. Click on the "Port" link in the left hand menu, and check the port that you want to remove from the default VLAN has a PVID that's not 1:


    In this case, port 4's PVID is 1, so we need to change it. Click on "04", change the PVID field to "2", and hit "Apply".
  4. Click on the VLAN link in the left, you'll be greeted with something like this:

  5. Right click a VLAN ID that is not 1 (so we right-click on 2 in our case), and select "Open link in new tab". Opening it in a new tab is important! You should see the VLAN table on its own in a tab (not with the normal left and top banner) like the following:

  6. Click on the icon under the port you want to remove from VLAN 1 (port 04 in our case) until it's untagged
  7. Press ctrl+shift+i to open the Chrome developer toolbar.
  8. Hit the "console" button, then type in (exactly as here, no quotes) "cur_vid=1;" and press return:


  9. Close the developer toolbar, then hit "Apply", and that should be it! Now when you click on "VLAN" in the left menu, then "01", you should see that the port has been removed:


    .

Any questions, comments or suggestions regarding the above process then do feel free to leave a comment. It's possible ZyXEL may fix this in an upcoming firmware update so ports can be removed from VLAN 1 without such a hack, but since the last firmware release was a number of years ago this does (unfortunately) seem unlikely.

Still, for a £27 switch I can live with firing up Chrome's developer toolbar and writing one line of Javascript when I need to perform a relatively rare operation!

Comments

  1. Dom9 December 2016 at 14:40

    Kind of worked a treat but I found you had to use a kind of "mask" so if you had ports already in VLAN1 you need to set any ports currently in VLAN1 to either U or T before you make the changes to the port you want to remove. If you don't do this, it will moan that you need to move other ports out of VLAN1 (if that makes sense !?)

    ReplyDelete
  2. peet128 August 2017 at 21:51

    You just saved me from having to buy a new switch! Works the same on a GS-1548. Thank you! But slightly damn you, as I really could have used some 10GbT ports, but again my wallet thanks you!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jukka Aho21 July 2021 at 16:48

    I bought a second-hand GS-1548 and immediately ran into this issue. This lead me to searching for a solution and I then found this post. Thank you for the tip!

    I have now written a small userscript — installable in the browser — which makes VLAN 1 work the exact same way as the other VLANs in the UI, so you can remove ports from it the normal way. The script is available here:

    https://github.com/znark/zyxel-switch-1500-series-enhancements

    I also studied the construction of the firmware a bit. From the initial look, it seems quite hackable — at least in so far as modifying the web-based management UI goes. That is, if a method can be found that allows safely flashing a custom firmware image or reverting to the stock one.) I included my notes of this initial investigation in the repository.

    ReplyDelete

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