Got a call from a customer: “Nothing is working, but only on one desk in the office.”
I poked around a bit, and sure enough, 2 PCs, 2 phones and 1 printer were offline.
Drove out to the customer, looked at the desk and talked to the manager.
Turns out they had run out of ethernet ports after hiring more people.
So instead of calling us, to save money they had bought a desk switch on Amazon and plugged it into a random ethernet port.
Its power chord lay on the floor, unplugged.
When I plugged it in again, the office dog came running, jumped up, pulled it out again and tried to kill it.The adapter probably had a whine that drove it mad lmao
Reminds me being called out to a customer “we have no internet these last two hours”
While he got me a coffee, i saw a switch without power. Pluged it in and when the coffee came internet access was restored.
He only said"yeah, i unpluged those two hours ago. No one ever told me our internet access runs over those"
Nope, mine are troopers. just doing their thing at least a decade on.
I miss this blue metal design. Yea the grey ones are nice, but the blue always made it look a little bit more interesting to have around.
Some models had a real time network utilization display for the 10mbps bridge and the 100mbps Ethernet. Was great back in the ADSL1 days, could see real time network usage on two sets of four green LEDs.
(And a flashing orange ‘collision’ light just for fun.)
Don’t touch that, it’s a load bearing 100Mbit switch.
It’s actually gigabit.
Switch? Na it was a load bearing hub.
I didn’t know they made gigabit hubs.
Have one and it just won’t die. It does its job so well you don’t even know it’s there.
If you’re thinking of getting a switch from Nintendo: don’t. They absolutely suck as networking devices!
I don’t even have anything plugged into mine lately. It just sits there in case I need another port for something.
Please ignore my dust. I’m a terrible housekeeper.
Beyond a certain point, that dust is critical to uptime and any disruption could compromise the whole operation. Do NOT clean that without meeting with all stakeholders who might potentially be impacted.
I self-host a few services that are shared with others off of that NAS. They aren’t paying stakeholders, but I suppose I do technically have some.
Just say you’re a dust collector.
That ironically reminds me I still have to remove like three of those.
… Four.
But they are up in tray handling a specific set of things I just dont give a shit about, in an office I never go to, on an air gapped network…
So…
Probably not going to bother. They can come out later.
Yeah mine aren’t doing anything important other than obscuring my SNMP traffic stats. I’ll probably accidentally forget about them again till next year.
Every network loop I’ve dealt with in the last 5/6 years has been caused by one of these menaces hidden under a desk with too many things plugged into them.
I have six of these daisy-chained together and my network is strong.
Teach me how to have a strong network also
Impressive
I plug both the ports on my phone into it to get twice the signal.
Nowadays you can get ones with STP for practically the same cost.
Got one of these keeping a connection good right now.
200M fibre drop and networking cab are at opposite ends of the house. When the drop was put in, I only had cat5 available to join the two. Distance makes only 100M link possible with the crappy cable to hand.
Through the magic of being cheap and having one of these bad boys spare - two crappy cables with this in-between gets the full beans out of the connection.
It’s been 3 months. It’s shoved in a corner that the cats (fluffy version) love to sit in. I have cat6 to hand now. I don’t need this anymore. I can fix it properly.
But it works and I just cba to do a new direct run.
I maintain that even for LANs 100Mb/s is actually more than enough for the majority of users as long as the latency is decent.
If I’m paying for 200M, I’m damn well gonna use it :)
I can actually run a few services now on the 200/200 that would be intolerable on the old 30/10. Like streaming and grabbing chunky files away from home in reasonable time. Was a big jump for us.
At work when we did a rip and replace last year, most of these were replaced with unfi flex minis because it was easier to do this than run new cables to do it properly, which was the reason little netgears like this were there in the first place
why’s that?
I retired mine from full-time service earlier
thislast year. It is still kept for emergencies.I just called mine back into service 🫡
I stopped using one of these late last year, only cuz I needed more than 5 ports lmao. It still works fine.
I bought 2 of these on clearance from somewhere for like 5 bucks thinking I would never use them. Years later, and a few more years in storage, they are both still going strong.
