Aaron Landry

Installed our new Netgear GSM7248 on Wednesday and it ended up being a slew of problems the rest of the week. It’s too bad because it was recommended rather highly from a friend of mine, recommended by a friend of my boss who is an “IT Consultant” and recommended as well from my equipment vendor who deals with a lot of clients with similar networks (but hasn’t sold many Netgear switches yet). I also did some research on my own and felt this would be a good fit at a good price.

The switch basically stops all traffic now and then due to the use of an old protocol and requires a restart. Pretty big issue, especially when all your users lose everything every 30 minutes. After some troubleshooting and crap support on Netgear’s end, I have to get a different switch. I will strongly say that Netgear is a company I will never buy anything with. They then sent me a follow-up survey and this is what I left in the comments:

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On my first call, whatever system you are using was breaking up his voice so badly I needed him to repeat things over and over again. Fix it. It’s horrid.

I was then offended that when I determined the problem I was having was specifically with the new switch, he prodded me with the “when did you last scan for viruses and spyware” question. Give me a break. I’m calling about a professional product and I’m obviously not some home network here when I buy a $2,000 switch and I expect professional service. After he didn’t know how to fix my problem he told me he’d call me back in 4-5 hours. He didn’t. When I called back 7 hours later he said, “Oh yeah, I was supposed to call you.”

Here’s my problem and the “solution”: I run a bunch of high end Mac, Linux and Unix machines here and there are a couple situations where I need to use the AppleTalk protocol. Problem is, using AppleTalk is essentially a DoS attack on the switch. Nice. He told me to “stop using AppleTalk,” but unfortunately I still have a few old devices that require it. This is not a valid solution. I asked about other switches or a firmware update, and he said that *ALL NETGEAR SWITCHES* have “problems” with AppleTalk. Now I understand that AppleTalk is an antiquated protocol and I don’t really want to use it either, but every piece of network hardware I’ve used handles it just fine.

Netgear must understand that it is a serious problem when a piece of switching hardware can be very, very easily prone to a simple DoS attack. Normally, hardware manufacturers will fix a problem that causes their equipment to fail. When your equipment fails, er, when your ENTIRE LINE fails due to plain and simple usage of a known protocol that everything else supports, that’s not a serious problem, it is really fucking pathetic.

I have no choice but to get my vendor to get me a unit from a reputable manufacturer and then make sure that vendor never sells Netgear products to people in my industry again (and he’ll listen, too).
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