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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> Dlink has a long history of putting out insecure and even backdoored devices and so anyone with a dlink device is probably better off buying something different

Except for unmanaged switches. These little D-Link unmanaged switches are little workhorses: I've got several so old I don't remember when I bought them. I take it D-Link didn't manage to fuck up even unmanaged switch?

But seen their approach to security, I probably won't buy D-Link again.

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I think they actually did manage to fuck up even the small unmanaged switches. I have three unmanaged switches at home, one on the ground floor and two in the first floor. Ground floor is an 8 port netgear, first floor are one to link and one d link.

Every couple of weeks, the entire wired network goes down. Not even pinging adresses works. The d links ports leds are all flashing (perfectly in sync!) until I power cycle it. Then everything goes back to normal.

I have no idea what happens, and I should probably replace the d link soon.

I have a couple of TP-Link unmanaged 4 port SOHO switches. They're pretty reliable so far.

The TP Link (typo in my other post) and the Netgear are reliable, only the D Link causes issues.

Jumbo frames? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo_frame

I haven't enabled jumbo frames knowingly on my system, but even if I had, why would the issue occur only every few weeks? Also, it seems to be rather independent of the actual network load.

A friend had networked speakers that would freeze until a manual reboot time to time. It turned out to be the Linux running within the speakers that crashed on the occasional jumbo frame.

Are you aware about broadcast storms? Perhaps you somehow accidentally introduced a loop in the network? The symptoms fit that exactly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_storm

STP is meant to prevent that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanning_Tree_Protocol

Of course you can't set up STP with unmanaged switches, so until you go managed and set up STP properly nothing will change.

I was not! Thanks for the hint!

Although I'm 100% sure there are no loops, I haven't changed the actual cable layout in ages.

It could be missing IGMP Snooping Protocol support in a network with IPTV or custom VLAN setups. There are 3 versions (IGMP snooping (v1, v2, and v3)), managed switches have them all, unmanaged usually don't have them. To avoid problems, only pass a single VLAN to the unmanaged switch (it must be behind the managed switch for that), otherwise the unmanaged switch can and usually will bring a network down after some time. Or just use a switch with IGMP snooping support.

If the D-link has a wall wart which you could easily replace, try that. (And maybe a real surge strip, if you've got one handy.) Iffy power can cause all sorts of bizarre behavior.

DLink were for me one of the least reliable small unmanaged switches I tried over the years. Out of those I have had (I have about 7 in the house, they get replaced when one dies), there was DLink, Linksys, HP, Netgear and TP-Link, the TP-Links are by far the most reliable in so much as I have never had one die, and now all my switches are TP-Link as all of the others gave up the gost.

The first 8-port 10G TP-Link switch I got died within a few weeks. I think its power supply fried. It's replacement has been rock solid since for the last year and change now, fortunately!

> I take it D-Link didn't manage to fuck up even unmanaged switch?

I'd hope not. I haven't seen it yet at least.

The Netgear GS series is king. Metal case 5,8,16 port gigabit unmanaged switches. Runs forever.

Those blue metal Netgear switches are the only Netgear products I buy (after they burned me with their crappy routers back in the 802.11G era to the point I went full Office Space on one).

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