2nd Linksys Switch Switch Dies....

[hucker]

In the last 2 years I've had 2 EtherFast 10/100 16port switches die on me, as in gone completely black, no power LED or connection LED's. My media room is warm but not hot, and the cabinet where the switch is installed is almost always open. I've had other linksys hardware that just seems to work. Is this sort of standard or did I just get really unlucky? I really want this this to 'just work' as WAF is directly tied to it.

Any recommendations for a replacement. Keeping about the same form-factor would be desirable. Moving up to 10/100/1000 and POE might be nice too but aren't required

 

[electron]

Do you have them plugged into a surge protector or UPS? I have yet to see Linksys hardware fail in 'warm' environments, so I am not convinced that heat is the issue here.

 

[MikeB]

We've had some terrible luck with certain Linksys/Cisco switches the past couple years, specifically the SR2024C which is a 24-port 10/100/1000 model. Seem to last for about 6-12 months, then half the ports stop working.

If you search around the web it's a common problem. I've been shying away from Linksys/Cisco switches for now, but still use and have good luck with their small-business routers (RV042/RV082/etc.).

Not sure about your 16-port 10/100 switch, what model is it?

 

[signal15]

Is your rack grounded? I've had problems like this in large datacenters, and grounding the racks fixed the problem in many cases.

 

[hucker]

They are in a 48 inch panel, not grounded, not on UPS. We live in seattle and there is not much lightning here, certainly none when it died.

Don't have a model number for you but the label says:


Linksys Etherfast 10/100 16 Port Auto-Sensing Switch

Here is a link to one:

http://www.superwarehouse.com/Linksys_Ethe...EZXS16W/p/44855

Not sure what I'm gonna do. I got the first one from a friend who upgraded, the second one for $20 on ebay. A 10/100/1000 is $200... right now a 10Mb hub is working...

 

[signal15]

It's not the lightning that was killing them, it was the voltage potential between line power, other equipment, and copper based WAN links coming in from the telco. We had some electrical engineering wizard come in, and he discovered that there was some current flow through the equipment that shouldn't have been there, and grounding the rack gave the electricity a better path and stopped it from going through the equipment.

It's worth a try.

 

[tmbrown97]

I personally had enough bad experiences with Linksys products that I totally stopped using them a few years ago. I had several routers both in my own house and in other installs I did where they would start failing... and unfortunately, it was rarely all at once. Usually it involved weeks of troubleshooting and routers getting progressively worse before I got fed up and replaced them.

I also had a switch from them (small 8-port) that cost me hours of frustration - so severe that it finally found its demise under the wheels of my suburban... about 20 times.

I since switched to netgear and have had no similar problems. Some of their switches have a few POE ports as well. I've been using their desktop switches at the office and at home for years - and have never really had one of their routers die on me.

Just my $.02.

 

[BioSehnsucht]

Me too for netgear. I currently have a 5 port 10/100/1000 switch (in the older, solid metal case, not the silly SOHO plastic stuff), and an 8 port 10/100/1000 semi-managed 'smart' switch (also in the nice blue metal case), which I'm definitely buying more of in the future at some point, I can actually make use of VLANs. I have an ancient d-link 10/100 switch that was over $100 new, back when having a switch over a hub in your home network was a bragging point. It has one dead port but otherwise is still kickin'.

Trendnet is probably ok too, at least their add-in NICs work fine. I've got a few PCI and PCIe gigabit trendnet NICs ($10 at Fry's) in various systems, work fine. They're all Realtek chipset cards I think, which are fine - you'll bottleneck at disk IO before you do the NIC.

I've had various problems with Linksys gear, mostly their older / crappier routers. I have a DD-WRT'd WRT-54G router hooked up to my FiOS connection rather than the ActionTec. If they ever fully get alternate firmwares on the ActionTec working complete with MoCA port the ActionTec will make a great router though - its only problem is buggy stock firmware.

 

[pete_c]

Personally the only Linksys product I use today is the WRT-54GL AP with DD-WRT on it. Historically used the VPN enabled switches but they really were pieces of garbage. Today I use multiple cheap plastic "SOHO" small switches that fit in my media cabinet from Geeks dot com. Near my media cabinet and on line for two years with no problems are two 16 port switches (which I see still listed at Geeks dot com) and 1 24 port switch which is still in my media cabinet after two years of 24/7 use.

I was wondering about the heat today so checked - the 24 port switch in the media cabinet is cool to the touch. All 24 ports are being used and there's a W2C box velcroed to the top of it and the cover still fits on the media cabinet. Think the label on the switch mentioned the name "SOHO".

My personal preference was something small and cheap that would fit in a media cabinet

If you want a somewhat intelligent switch then I would go with a used Cisco Switch provided you want something with a larger footprint. I've worked with 3rd party cheaper switches in one Data Center (out of > 50) and mostly what I have seen is garbage which attempts to be data center quality. (IE: Dell for one)

 

[hucker]

It's pretty funny, I've been doing home networking 'stuff' for about 10 years and have mostly bought linksys gear and until these two switch problems their routers and access points have worked great for me at home (and even at work). I do have a sonicwall firewall and it has been 24/7 for 3 years...

OK so I've been researching it and it looks like this unit will work nicely for me:

Netgear ProSafe GS108

It is only an 8 port but with my space requirements I could stack two of them to get my 16 ports back.

I haven't run multiple switches before on the same network, is that a problem? It seems that 'stuff' plugged in to the second switch will have an extra hop to get out. Any problems with that?

Thanks for the input.

 

[electron]

There won't be a problem running multiple switches (unless you do some really complex stuff with high end switches, and didn't configure them right).

I do like my Netgear switch as well, it's very slim, and gives me 16 ports in the can. There is a Gig-E version now, but I don't remember the price or model #.

http://www.cocoontech.com/forums/index.php...=si&img=215

 

[pete_c]

Hucker - didn't mean to knock Linksys down as much as I did. Historically been playing with networking since the 80's both at home and work.

I was also thinking of starting to use Gig at home maybe starting only between the servers initially. The Netgear looks like a decent switch.

Today the small cheapo SOHO switches are all interconnected on one subnet next to each other. My only concern is one subnet. Hopping from one switch to the other doesn't create any media playback problems with 720 HD playback while copying large 4.X gig files from one server to another. Any problems that I have seen have usually been related to a bad NIC somewhere on the network beaconing, etc....never seen traffic utilization isssues with the basic "stuff".

I guess my concern regarding Linksys was relating to an effort I tried (kind of worked) which I built a small inter-office VPN connected network (main office and about 10 satellite offices) in the latee 1990's. The Linksys routers that I used / Firmware was garbage. I used the product to keep the costs down. But I guess garbage in / garbage out is really a good saying. Really I guess this one experience just made me stay away from Linksys (I also use a Buffalo AP with DD-WRT - its actually better than the Linksys WRT-54GL).

I have a number of SOHO Sonic Firewalls which I purchased a while ago. They were good firewalls at the time providing some basic functionality.

Personally switched over to a "home brew" software firewall in the early 90's but still use a small HW firewall in FL.

Thinking with a advances of networking especially in the home world it would be nice if there were some basic guidelines (IE unless there is and I haven't really seen it or looked for it) relating to:

1 - Broadband/DSL connections - connectivity speeds used to be a bottleneck
2 - Firewalls - the need to protect one's personal network - reasonably but securely
3 - Network switches and interconnectivity say for:
a - servers - file servers, media servers etc - bandwidth requirements for media streaming etc
b - home PC's - most now have combo 1000/100/10 nics - what does a gig switch really buy you for home networking - WLAN's are getting faster
4 - HA - many folks are using their home networks for security basics, HA basics, etc - what's the best network topology - methodologies ...

 

[hucker]

Pete and Dan:

Thanks for the responses (I'm going going to figure out how to put my panduit on standoffs...).

I'll pull the trigger in the next couple of days on those 8 port gigE Netgear switches. The price is right plus I could really use the bandwidth between a couple of my machines.

It is pretty interesting about the network topology question. I thought long and hard about this stuff and I ended up with two completely separate networks, one for my work and one for everything else. I do have path between the two using the sonicwall. This is for backups but that is pretty well locked down on the firewall. When I hear how little most people do it scares me...alot.

Thanks

 

[BioSehnsucht]

a - servers - file servers, media servers etc - bandwidth requirements for media streaming etc
b - home PC's - most now have combo 1000/100/10 nics - what does a gig switch really buy you for home networking - WLAN's are getting faster

Wireless has a hard time approaching 100mbit speeds, much less gigabit. Additinoally, wireless has lots of packet collision and noise interference issues that prevent it from reaching anywhere near it's advertised speed. Wired is much more reliable, and lower latency.

Gigabit nearly guarantees you're not going to see limitations due to network speed - if you're running out of bandwidth on gigabit, you can probably afford multiple gigabit links and bonded interfaces, or even 10GigE hardware. Moving videos around on a 100mbit network is noticeably slower than a gigabit, making file transfers as fast as local disk to disk storage. Gigabit makes storing and using files via network shares practical with practically no performance impact in nearly all cases.

Typical video playback even at HD resolutions will work fine at 100mbit, and sometimes ok on wireless (varies on conditions), but when gigabit hardware is only fractionally more expensive why limit yourself ? If nothing else, deploying gigabit switches and wiring appropriately will allow you to utilize gigabit on devices that support it now and upgrade other devices easily later. Some devices (consoles and Tivos, etc) may not handle more than 100mbit regardless, but it doesn't hurt to have it in place.

Especially if you have multiple switches in different locations you should want to have the links between them gigabit, as it's easy for just a few devices' combined utilization to saturate a 100mbit link between switches. Once I have some more "smart" switches I plan to actually use two ports on each in a bonded link to have 2Gbit link between them.

Plan for the future and do your network infrastructure just once

 

[felixrosbergen]

+1 on the netgear.. I have a 16Port Gig Prosafe switch (metal housing) that seems to work just fine. It's mounted on plywood in the basement so it stays pretty cool. The case still seems to heat up a bit, but not too bad.

I did noticed that there is a grounding screw on the case. I suppose it wouldnt be a bad idea to ground this thing. I've recently grounded all my RF splitters, since they have the connection for it i thought it woudl probably be a good idea.