GS105ev2 firmware breaks prosafe plus

Yes, intentional - and documented in the firmware release notes (kind of, albeit cryptic).

From wally brain, these were the phase-out and replacement steps:

• The last release of Adobe Air was released late 2020, soon making any applications like the Prosafe Plus Utility obsolete and no longer supported (and supportable) - at the same time, the easy to find download references to the Prosafe Plus Utility, have been disabled.
  
  
• A long time ago, vulnerability was published on how insecure the NSDP (Netgear Switch Discovery [and configuration] Protocol is - the password was always sent over the network in plain text. Had answered this  -here- in the community.
  
  
• These two events marked the end of the workable, and deployable Prosafe Plus Utility. Around the year 2022, the Gigabit Ethernet Plus Switches User Manual was updated the least time, and all references to the Prosafe Plus Utility have been removed.
  
  -> This affected only a few early models of the ProSAFE Plus Switch family (such as the GS108Ev1) because most of these switch model variants does not support a web-GUI - while  most newer models have an easy to work Web-GUI.
  
  
• With subsequent firmware releases, Netgear disabled the NSDP switch -configuration- features by default. Users had to login to the switch, and had to intentionally re-enable the configuration options.
  
  
• Since V1.6.0.15, the the NETGEAR Switch Discovery Protocol (NSDP) that was used by Prosafe Plus Utility as well as the old NETGEAR Switch Discovery Tool (NSDT) is no longer supported. Instead, now NDT (Network Discovery Protocol) or the latest NETGEAR Insight app can be used to discover the switch within the same IPv4 subnet. NDT makes use of Multicast protocol, standardized using the SSDP, or Simple Service Discovery Protocol - a network protocol that allows devices to automatically advertise and discover services on a local network (and withing the same IP subnet only). It is a core component of Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and enables devices like printers, smart TVs, and gaming consoles to find and communicate with each other without manual configuration.

tsduke2025 wrote:

Tried both V1.6.0.15 and V1.6.0.21 and neither were discoverable by the utility.  Rolled back to .10 and it works again.

A very bad advice, sorry - explained above (along with other issues and bugs addressed by these newer versions).