3Com Switch 4500 - Can't Manage due to VLAN?

[romorocks]

Problem
Can't manage my switch.

I have a 3Com switch 4500 using VLAN's to separate traffic - each location is subnetted. This is all working perfect with one exception, I cannot manage the switch, I think because the management defaults to VLAN 1. All routing and separation of traffic is working fine across multiple VLAN's, its just that I cannot manage the switch.

Info
- switch is outside firewall (yes, firewall rules are setup and allow communications to pass to it and back)on our private infrastructure
- switch is using private addressing in 172.16.x.x range
- all routing working just fine
- switch default vlan id is 1 I believe, and I have no VLAN 1 setup in my firewall. The issue if I was to create this is that I already have vlan 1000 setup for this infrastructure.

Question
Can I change the management VLAN ID of the switch to be 1000 so that it should then be manageable? The user manual makes it difficult to determine how to do something, it simply lists command line options. I am assuming I want to add a 'VLAN Interface' but am unsure how to proceed.

Any help appreciated. For now I am manually connecting which is not great, plus I cannot then get alerting working.

 

[SYQUEST]

From my understanding all 3COM switches that support VLANs are designed this way. You must keep at least one port in VLAN 1 for management, unless you have a console port. Then you could put a terminal server on it and patch it to one of your LANs for access.

Why not renumber one of your VLANs to one?

You might call 3COM tech support and ask them if they have any other options for your situation.

....JIM....