Netgear GS724T switches+light flickering question

[Kyle]

One of the primary schools i visit has just hag a couple of these switches fitted. I noticed today that the lights on these seem to be nearly permanently on with very very minimal flicker. If i use one of the other older DLink switches the flicker patters is what you would expect.

Does anyone know any thing about these Netgear Switches and the light flickers.

The two switches in question both have a 1GB fibre coming into them from other buildings and i believe that network performance as not Ben to its best since these went in. I only know that some one recommended these to the school because they were 'cheap' :-(

[crc-ict]

Two possible theories:

1. The new switches have a light permanently on to indicate connectivity, which then flickers off to indicate activity, rather than the normal pattern of an un-illuminated indicator flickering on.

2. The old switches have Spanning Tree Protocol enabled, the new ones don't and there is a loop in the network cables somewhere

May well not be either, but hopefully the suggestion might be helpful!

[john]

I have a couple of netgear desktop 8 port switches that do this, never got to the bottom of it, no loopbacks, manual doesn't say that it should be doing this but everything seems ok so I am not really worrying about it.

[kingswood]

Same here- we inherited some Netgears and they tend to stay "on" and flicker "off" when there is a lull in activity. Definitely no loop though.

Looking at the spec on the Netgear site reveals a couple of things:

1. They are managed switches. Use the tools on the switch to monitor traffic flow etc and see what is going on inside the switches. It might be that they have small packet buffers or a lower backplane and so be slightly slower than a more expensive option.

2. It looks like they use "Store and Forward" switching. This is always slower than, say, cut-through. It effectively takes the frames in fully before deciding which port to throw them out of. That takes processing and memory bandwidth.

Again, look at the performance monitoring of the switch and see what it throws up. Info here:

http://www.netgear.com/Products/Swit...es/GS724T.aspx

HTH

[Dos_Box]

I use the GS724T and their 48 port brothers and have had no issues with them whatsoever. They are semi-managed and there are several firmware updates that may need to be applied, but I use the web interface to tell me if there are problems, not staring at the lights which I expect to flash anyway.
I would recommend these switches to anyone who needs GB throughout and a degree of management.

[richard]

I have used these switches a lot and never had any problems with at all. Like Dos_Box I use the web interface to tell me if there is anything wrong with the switches. They do tend to flash a fair bit but I have never found this to be a problem at all.

[spc-rocket]

Hi Guys,

This seems normal because it will flash if the workstation has WOL network card. You can look at the NIC on the PC and that will be flashing as well, this is so the WOL packets can be sent to wake up the PCs.

Our cisco swicthes do these as well and at first we couldn't work out why this was but then we looked at the station and their lights were flashing as well.

Ash.