What causes ports to stop working on netgear switches ?

[caffrey]

Strange occurrences yesterday, I was getting reports of machines not connecting to the domain. On investigation the machines had the exclamation mark on the network icon and they were given the usual 169 address. After a bit of troubleshooting I determined the fault to be at the switch and this is where it got weird - all I did was swap the patch lead to a spare port on the same switch and the machine started working again. Now I could put this down to a faulty switch (a lot of the devices were on this switch) but then it started happening to machines on other switches - totally randomly. The problem switch in question had very high tx errors on the uplink but this was spread over 300 days of uptime.

 

These are Netgear switches , combo of different ages of gs724t and gs724at, never seen this behaviour happen in all the time they've been installed (5 years)

 

I'm thinking of lagging the uplinks on that switch (The majority of the admin is on there) to see if I can improve the throughput.

[Paul_Fielder]

Strange that, we have gs724t switches, one machine yesterday would not show an active network connection, swapped the lead, and the point still nothing. Removed The machine to our office and it worked straight away. I put it down to an issue withe the image of the workstation. Re-imaged last night and plan to return it today.

[caffrey]

I did the same, brought a machine back and it worked fine in the office - I find sometimes that PCs just need a "walk" to get them working Did you swap the port on the switch ? Maybe its netgear self destruct week!

[synaesthesia]

The name "Netgear" on the front of a switch quite often precedes problems.

[Dos_Box]

In my last place I saw similar behavior. Maybe one a year per switch (had a few). A hard reboot - disconnect from mains - solved the problem. Never found wout what caused it though, but it was always just a single port dropping.

[caffrey]

Swapped switch, been no errors for the last 3 hours - I replaced the switch to switch uplink cable with a cat6 instead of the home made thing that was there. I did get a call from reception saying they had no network but I'd forgot to plug that patch cable back in.

 

Up to now everything seems okay, but now I've tempted fate.

 

Yes I know about Netgear, I'm in the process of getting approval to replace with HP