[geeks] Recommendations on an Ethernet Switch?

[Tom Borton]

> We have dozens of Netgear hubs, and a couple of unmanaged switches, and
> I can only recall one failure, and that one was a hub that completely
> stopped working.  I haven't yet bothered to figure out if it was the hub
> or power supply that failed.  At present they are my vendor of choice
> for unmanaged gear.
> 
>     Micah> ... (needs to be powercycled all the time, won't remember
>     Micah> settings, crappy throughput, whatever).
> 
> I've never used anything from Netgear that had settings, so I can't say
> if they have any problems there, and have never needed to power cycle
> anything of theirs (and unlike some no-names, they have never locked up
> due to power glitches either).  As far as throughput, I've never needed
> to check that in any part of the network where I have Netgear equipment
> deployed, so I can't say.
> 
> 
I've had the same problems with the Netgear switches, even the basic unmanaged ones, with both 10/100 and 10/100/1000 with 8-24 ports.  We had a tech disassembling 3 Linux systems trying to "fix" the Ethernet ports because they stopped communicating - I walked in, pulled the power, counted to 5, and plugged it back in.  All 3 systems began communicating again...  Switch was all of 3 weeks old.  Interestingly enough, none of the M$ boxes on the switch had problems.  We were pulling data off of 5 systems at the rate of about 2 kbps.

I have an unmanaged D-Link 24-port 10/100 switch (DSS-24+) that I got cheap from zipzoomfly.com (I hate that name!), and it hasn't had problem with the mix of kits I have hooked up.  I haven't really tried to stress it, either.

Tom Borton