I do networking in the industrial space. This is the most truest statement on the internet.
Edit: for clarification I don’t put these in place. Most of my job is doing audits and telling people to get rid of them and then replacing them.
I have two of these running now. They’re both at least ten years old. I think one of them was salvaged from the storage room at work. Gigabit is plenty fast enough for my home network.
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.power chord
I like e-flat minor with augmented drop D tuning, you?
The adapter probably had a whine that drove it mad lmao
Whilst I do like legacy netgear switches, PoE switches are godsend
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.
Don’t touch that, it’s a load bearing 100Mbit switch.
Don’t laugh at it! In the days it was ideal when you needed something for port-mirroring. (I still might be able to find it somewhere deep down in a crate)
It’s actually gigabit.
Only slightly better. Meme still applies.
Honestly gigabit ethernet is still more than fast enough. I annoyingly have to deal with an iMac G5 that just has a fast ethernet port.
Switch? Na it was a load bearing hub.
I didn’t know they made gigabit hubs.
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.
If you have to assist someone remotely they also do tend to have fewer small blue boxes.
Can’t you still get these in blue? I see them for sale.
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.)
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.
Have one and it just won’t die. It does its job so well you don’t even know it’s there.
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.
Impressive
Teach me how to have a strong network also
Nowadays you can get ones with STP for practically the same cost.
I plug both the ports on my phone into it to get twice the signal.
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.
If you’re thinking of getting a switch from Nintendo: don’t. They absolutely suck as networking devices!
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.
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.
The old adage “There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution” still applies.
If the business relies on the availability of the thing that’s receiving a temporary fix, you can be your ass someone, somewhere, is declining the downtime to fix it properly once it’s up and running.
