New setup -- best practises 4208/1810

[Van de Velde Gerd]

Hi,

I'm setting up a new network for our remote company and I'm searching for some best practices and guidances since I'm not really a network-guy.

The setup is as follows

1x 4208 chassis (which holds the router and servers)

5x 1810-48G

All of the swichtes are loaded with the latest fw as available.

I want to build the following setup, basically creating a star-topology:

Everything is working as expected but I want to fine-tune things. Especially since on this location there is no IT staff.

7 switches and 7 vlans

-1 trunk of 2 copper ports to a 1810

-1 trunk of 2 copper ports to a 1810

- the other 4 1810's are connected by fiber on 1 port.

- older 3 com also needs to be connected in a later stadium.

I already made the basic config and vlans, and they are working fine, but I have the following questions:

-should I be using a static trunk or LACP ? I can find both pro & contra's for both solutions.

-should I enable loop protection on the 1810's ? If so, should I enable this on the trunk ports, the trunk itself or on the "client" ports, or all of them ?

-should I enable STP or similar/other on the 4208, and if so, on which ports / trunks (Log network problems in the GUI ?)

-should I consider to enable/disable some other features regarding stability/manageability ?

If I enable spanning tree, should I do this in the GUI or through the CLI ?

I'm really sorry if this has already been answered in another topic, but I can't see to find an answer that fits my scenario.

Thanks

Gerd