The gigabit ethernet switch which I recently bought appeared to work fine for the first week. Then it started locking up randomly. At this point I looked through the logs on my servers and found that it had also sporadically been dropping link a few times a day for a couple of seconds at a time. That’s not that bad, but not that great either. Locking up is unforgivable.
When it locked up it would flash on all 8 bottom LEDs and then flash the port 8 top LED alternatively. Power cycling it didn’t work. Leaving it unplugged for several hours seemed to work. I had bought it at one of the mid-sized computer shops, so last Friday my wife and I went to exchange it. The shop grumbled a bit that it was past 7 days but swapped it out anyways.
The new one still drops link occasionally, and tonight it locked up again. Checking the all-knowing oracle (otherwise known as Google), one quickly finds numerous bad reviews for this switch at e.g. Newegg and Amazon mentioning the same things, link dropping and the switch locking up. The switch locking up was blamed on overheating. Wish I’d read these reviews beforehand, but I thought gigabit switches were pretty much all the same now.
So looks like D-Link blew it on this one. I’ll have to get Maggie to ring up the local D-Link support and see what they are going to do about it since it seems to be a common problem. I’ve generally had pretty good experience with D-Link in the past though. I have a travel router, wifi pc-card, 24-port 10/100 switch and an 8-port 10/100 switch from D-Link which haven’t had any notable problems. I’m hoping they will replace it with a different hardware version that doesn’t have this problem (both mine were version C3) or a different model. It looks like this model is being discontinued now, but its little brother, the DGS-1005D has reviews noting the same problem and it’s still out on the market.
I’ll also have to look around for a different brand of gigabit switch, but they aren’t very widely available here.
In other related updates from that entry, I have upgraded my primary server to use ZFS on the home directory partition using mirrored zfs. I decided zfs root was still too dodgy. When they get it in a supported version and upgradeable I’ll check it out. (Briefly they need official zfs mountroot support, grub zfs support, failsafe boot zfs support and support upgrading before I’ll touch it.) The SATA drive in the test server is also ZFS’d though it’s not RAIDed at all. The important part is that ZFS and the SATA controller both seem to be stable, just my damn network isn’t.
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