Dead Switch

It is now a bit more than 24 hours since I bypassed a switch on my network. Nat and I were both getting warnings that our Ethernet connections were going down and coming back up. Then they would do it again. This was killing our network. At first I thought it was my computer. Then I thought it was my $20 router. Then I thought it might be some wires. Then I noticed the funky blinking lights on the switch.

What exactly is a switch? It is a bank of Ethernet ports that has a tiny brain that helps direct traffic. Each port knows what computer is at the other end of the line, roughly. This allows information that comes in to the switch to be directed more quickly and more directly and with less noise to the place it needs to go. Sounds great. When it works it is great. For some reason, the world of cheap switches has produced a shit-ton of bad devices. They just fail after a while. If you reset them, they work for a minute then die again.

When you ping-flood from one computer to another, you should really get no loss in packets. Even if you are headed across a larger network, you should not get any loss. as I type, if I ping flood from one box to the other, using only the router, I get zero loss. When the switch was between the machines I got 6% packet loss if it worked at all. That percent may not sound like much, but 1% in a ping flood is nearly catastrophic for database communication.

kelly@vodka:~/docs/date/current$ sudo ping -f 192.168.x.x
PING 192.168.x.y (192.168.2.x) 56(84) bytes of data.
--- 192.168.x.x ping statistics ---
3733 packets transmitted, 3732 received, 0% packet loss, time 3802ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.433/0.965/1.987/0.096 ms, ipg/ewma 1.018/1.028 ms

The bad switch got tossed.