14 Jan
2006
14 Jan
'06
8:34 p.m.
At 7:46 PM -0600 1/14/06, James Rice wrote:
A lot of older equipment won't auto-negotiate with
newer "switches".
In my recent experience, Linksys is one of the worst offenders.
This is exactly why I keep a pair of 3Com 24 port 10BT hubs in my
network. I've recently picked up some 24 port Netgear 10BT hubs on
ebay for under $10 each. They also work well with older Macs,
Sgi's, NeXT's that don't seem to get along with a lot of the
cheaper, newer switches and routers.
I've got a newer Linksys 16-port 10/100 switch (purchased in the last
year or so). So far I've had pretty good luck with it. I've got a
VAXstation 4000/vlc and a PDP-11/73 connected to it, and if it can
handle running DECnet/E through it, then it's pretty good in my book.
It also has an *old* Asante Ethertalk to Localtalk converter box
connected. I think the 10/100 hub the switch replaced was a Linksys,
and it wouldn't work right with DECnet/E, but then I replaced it when
I realized how bad of performance I was getting transferring a few GB
of data via 100Mbit, there was just plain something wrong with the
Hub.
I do like keeping an older 10Mbit hub around with a 10Base-2 port on
it (even though I do own a 10Base-2 to 10Base-T converter box, as
I've got a DECserver 90L+ and an Amiga 3000 that require 10Base-2.
I had a really nice 8-port 10/100 Netgear switch, but the ports
quickly started dying. Plus the 8-port 10/100 Linksys hub had some
dead ports as I recall, and I had a 24-port Intel 10/100 switch with
a lot of dead ports, that finally gave out on me. All in all, I
don't have a lot of faith in hubs or switches lasting very long. So
I'm personally inclined to attribute such problems to switches that
are going bad, than Linksys switches not working well with older
hardware.
Zane
--
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
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| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |