Can anyone think of a reason why a company would go through 3 switches in 3 months? 1 Netgear and 2 D-Link switches have burned out and they can't figure out why. I've never been to the place, but a CG I know does work for them and is baffled by these incidents. I told him to remove all unnecessary cabling from the switches and I will come out to test the working cables. In the meantime, I'm looking for any insight or anyone who has experienced this issue. TIA!
Do they have DC adapters? If not, i would check the your power source. Also, its not unreasonable to assume a bad nic card causing these problems, which will be a royal pain to determine; especially if you have a ton of nodes connected to the switch.
Does it kill all the ports on the switch? a bad NIC might be it. It could be bad power too. Do they have a UPS on the switch?
1 netgear and 2 d-link switches? he's out what, $20-$30 each?
Get a switch that is SNMP capable. If he has an offending NIC in a node, it should be possible to isolate it. Is the switch in a UPS? Voltage spikes can kill one fast.
One other thing to check, will the switch work after it has failed? Is the failure catastrophic? or do the electronics recover?
Other than that, he is getting what he is paying for.
Switches could be overheating. Is the whole switch burning out or just one of the ports?
I really don't think using an SNMP capable switch is going to help troubleshoot this problem. Any NIC that's capable of killing a switch (if that is indeed what is going on--I'm doubtful) will just kill the more expensive switch just as dead.
If the switch is totally dead and it uses a wall-wart, it might be worthwhile to test the wall-wart to see if it still works. If not you have a power quality problem, not a bad NIC problem.
All 24 ports fail when it occurs. I'm leaning towards bad power. Waiting for authorization to dispatch and I'll update. Thanks for the input.
Are these PoE Switches?
I have had individual ports burn out on PoE switches before from having too much sustained current draw. The Linksys SRW224P was notorious for having port burn-out from PoE devices.
I have ran into consumer-grade switches failing quickly due to poor ventilation, but even that is pretty uncommon.
If the Netgear switch was part of their "ProSafe" line then you have a lifetime unlimited warranty on it and netgear will send you a new one. If the problem is in the AC Adapter then you are stuck buying a new one (assuming the switch has an external adapter).
I believe that if your purpose of the switch is just for a basic switch. I think the cheap ones do the exact same thing that the expensive ones do.
There was one day that lightning hit my building or perhaps extremely close to it. I am not sure exactly what happen but it really screwed up almost all my electronics.
The following morning,
1. my Router was dead
2.My network Switch was dead.( Port# 4 lights up even when no cable is attached and no ports work
3. Network card in a computer broke
4. there were 2 ports on my phone system(Nitsuko 124I) were dead. Phones had the message( startup process) forever.
5.Sound card is flaking out
6.My LCD monitor stopped working a few days later.
It will not even turn on.
The strange thing is that I have my equipment hooked up to UPS should clean up the power and protect against power surges. However, I had lot of damage to try to fix.
Would this be the result of a EMP from the lighting rather than a power surge?