I've got 5 Netgear GS724Tv3 switches, all with current firmware. Each and every one of them stops responding to management traffic after three weeks or so of run time. By "stops responding to management traffic", I mean:
* won't respond to ping or SNMP * web management interface doesn't respond * does not respond to SmartControlCenter
They do continue to pass regular traffic. The ONLY fix is to bounce the switch power. Since that means disrupting production traffic, that has to be done off-hours, with a trip to the server room.
A while ago, I opened a trouble ticket on this issue. When the support techs responded, they asked for a traffic capture to see if there was anything odd that could trigger a switch hang. This sort of makes sense, except for the following:
* It's a gigabit switch, with large, continuous traffic flows (time 5 switches) * It takes multiple weeks before the switch hangs, which means I'd have to figure out how to capture huge quantities of traffic * The production traffic includes PPI which means I'd have to figure out how to sanitize any data before releasing it. * Transferring a traffic capture of hundreds of gigabytes for network analysis seems a bit silly.
I can't believe I'm the only one seeing this, but the folks working the trouble ticket never uttered a peep about seeing similar reports. Has anybody else run into a similar problem? If there's any Netgear tech support people here, how do we figure this problem out?
I'm holding off buying any more Netgear enterprise equipment until this gets sorted out. I'm willing to help troubleshoot, as long as the request is practical.
but manangement hangs after a day or so. everything else works though.
Now, this IS interesting..... For many years I've had similar problems with FS and GS versions of Netgears switches of various different port counts. Switch was still functioning but stopped responding to pings and could not be accessed by web browsers. Sometimes the situation lasted for days, weeks, or months and then either cleared itself up on its own or I had to power cycle it. When it happened again it would usually be within a day or week or two at most. Very annoying. Packet traces sent to Netgear showed nothing that gave them any clue why the problems happened. It's been about 7 months since the last incident. Don't know why this long dry spell, but I welcome it.
