The trusty Netgear GS116 that serves as our core switch had recently found itself the victim of unexpectedly rapid growth in the number of networked devices in this house, its 16 gigabit-capable ports filled to capacity. When I purchased it, the proposition of needing more than 16 ports within the next three or so years had seemed an unlikely one. It just goes to show.
With the growing number of networked devices comes greater network complexity and so I started to look for a replacement switch that would provide more visibility into what’s going on within the network.
Having enjoyed reliable service from various Netgear routers and switches over the last few years, both professionally in the US as well as at home in Mountain View and Amsterdam, that company’s offerings were my natural starting point.
Amongst other devices, I looked at the GS748TR and its beefier brother, the GSM7248R. I preferred the latter, but was put off by its relatively high latency, 20 µs for a 64 byte frame. 5 µs is more typical these days.
Ex-colleagues from the Google networking fraternity were adamant that no switch other than the HP ProCurve 2848, a large, heavy, not to mention expensive slab of a device, should even be considered. Such a monster would be overkill for my needs, to be sure, but with the knowledge that I’d already misjudged our growing networking needs in the recent past, I had all the justification I needed for indulging myself with the purchase of this industrial-strength bit-pusher.
After a bit of poking around, I found a Dutch supplier selling the switches quite a bit cheaper than his competitors. I could have bought one second-hand on eBay, but the purchase was expensive enough that I didn’t want to risk possible problems with a used unit.
The switch arrived the very next day, if I remember correctly. I placed it in the server room (a grandiose, but nevertheless accurate name for the cupboard under the stairs), but there was nowhere to really put it, because of its size. The GS116 was sitting on top my patch cabinet, but there’s no way the ProCurve 2848 could be made to balance there; it was much too big.
I was therefore forced to simply place it on top of the box it came in, which put it far enough away from the patch cabinet that I could only connect a few devices to it for testing. It was important not only to conduct a burn-in, but also to get to grips with configuring the switch, prior to putting it into full service.
Not being a consumer grade device, the switch’s factory state meant that some work on it needed to be done before letting it loose in production.
First of all, I upgraded the firmware on the switch to the latest version, I.10.70.
Next, I had to figure out which features were turned on by default and which were off.
For example, the switch’s DHCP relay was turned on, but needed to be turned off, because DHCP service on our network is provided by a different device on the same subnet. ssh was turned off, but needed to be on. Jumbo Ethernet frames, desirable on a gigabit network, are similarly off by default.
The lack of proper housing for the new switch provided the perfect opportunity to dispense with the existing patch cabinet, which had, in any case, also reached full capacity, and replace it with a larger model in which the 2848 could be properly mounted.
A first attempt at this yielded a new patch cabinet that was welded together and couldn’t be dismantled, which meant that it was too wide to pass through the door of the server room. I would need a patch cabinet that could be assembled in situ.
It took a while to find a cabinet that was deep enough to house the new switch, but also available in kit form. Actually, that bit was quite easy: my installer did the homework for me. What took rather longer, however, was waiting for the cabinet to arrive, once it had been ordered.
Last week, finally, the new cabinet came through and I had my installer come over to do the rewiring. It was a huge job, as every cable had to be unwired from its port in the old patch cabinet, labelled, and then later rewired to a port in the new patch cabinet.
Because the patch panels in the previous cabinet had already reached full capacity, there were also a number of CAT 5e cables emerging from holes in the wall or gaps in the ceiling, from where they fed straight into the previous switch, bypassing the patch panels. These errant cables would now also need to be wired into ports in the new patch panels.
The work took a very full day to complete, thanks to the assembly and mounting of the cabinet on the wall, all of the rewiring, and finally the testing of every port to make sure they were all functional. Only one port turned out to be incorrectly wired and that was quickly rectified.
Thanks to the new switch, I could quickly ascertain that all of the ports that should have been operating at gigabit speed were, in fact, doing so.
The home network had been down for the entire day, which, in this house, makes the telephones unusable and even renders watching TV a tricky proposition. You really realise the value of your network at a moment like that.
Thankfully, though, the work has been completed. I’m very pleased with the new hardware and, at the risk of being proved wrong a second time, I’m confident that the new patch cabinet and switch will allow our network to grow for the next several years without running out of capacity.
