Reminder That Netgear Is Garbage

[Robotron2k84]

[the_tunaman]

I wasn’t aware that they had business-class devices, but their consumer gear is the best in my experience and humble opinion.

I would go with one of the mainstream vendors for business purposes… Cisco serves our enterprise well.

[ibanezfoo]

Still light years beyond Linksys or any other consumer garbage. Their cheap *** little metal switches seem to be the ones that can survive a hot fabrication facility covered in grinder dust. Not that we use many, preferring to run a drop where needed, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

[Robotron2k84]

[ibanezfoo]

Ciscos are also garbage and full of bugs. We pay TONS of money for TAC on top of the tens of thousands of dollars for our switches. I would never buy a Cisco device without a TAC contract. We're on the phone with them like every day. A while back there was an issue where a device wouldn't route class B. Just wouldn't do it. Wasted a bunch of time with TAC only to find out oh yeah theres a bug it doesn't work. Well F me isn't a router supposed to route?

We recently deployed a bunch of Meraki stuff. A regretful decision I am glad wasn't mine. Sure there is some neat network visibility but all kinds of things randomly stop working or get blocked for no reason. You have to reboot those POSs all the time.

AdTran is also buggy crap.

I don't know about any Netgear enterprize stuff as its never been anything I'd consider but their little blue consumer boxes are durable AF.

[crufflers]

If Netgear and Cisco are out, what is the recommendation?

[Robotron2k84]

There’s also Aruba, Juniper, Dell and a bunch of smaller niche vendors.

It’s a given that if you step up to Cisco, you sign over your first-born and a pile of cash. That being said, their support is the best out there.

A warranty hopefully buys you insurance against infant mortality, but a service contract is an insurance policy for business continuity. It’s just part of the cost of running the enterprise.

Where the smaller players fall down, is their attitude towards hardware replacement, time to resolution and general resistance to effecting a fix.

On several occasions I’ve liaised with Cisco Tac to get a build and hotfix for my specific problem. It depends on the product line and service level, but that’s generally unheard of for the other players, except the smallest startups.

I will say this about Ibanez’s routing issue: Bugs exist in all devices, where the players differentiate is if the bug causes switching or routing failure or device degradation. Sounds like you hit a serious bug, but if it didn’t take down the network, then count yourself as being in good graces, because such a bug in other vendors’ products would crash the device.

Also, I don’t count on the uplifted feature sets of the device to do the work of a device in a different class. Yes, those features are there to be used, but the resources given to them are meager and they do not substitute for a dedicated device.

YMMV.

[ibanezfoo]

If Netgear and Cisco are out, what is the recommendation?

Had a lot of good luck with Juniper and HP. I don’t know if it’s still the case but hp used to offer lifetime warranties on everything. They were basically rip offs of Cisco being modular and the OS was very similar to IOS. I dunno that I’d say Cisco would be out just realize when you’re getting into and pay close attention to feature sets and what costs extra, TAC, etc. Also weird stuff like PoE not working unless 2 power supplies are installed and the switch only ships with one…. Cisco nickel and dimes you for everything including the maximum throughput on devices you already own…

I don’t know anyone that’s ever been fired for buying Cisco….

[Robotron2k84]

[ibanezfoo]

Ah good ol Meraki.... Had a major power spike due to a huge storm that blew through last night. A couple Cisco 9000 series APs did not survive. Weird. But the Meraki MX units took a few restarts to actually start working again. They'd ping and looked fine but would not route. This stuff is garbage. Our old routers never had issues with power or weirdness like this.

[Robotron2k84]

Is your gear not line conditioned?

[ibanezfoo]

Is your gear not line conditioned?

Of course it is, on big *** UPS systems. Which is something else we need to investigate. None of the other equipment had any issues (a few racks of servers, switches, UCS, etc). Just the Merakis

[ibanezfoo]

So the UPS was fine, it shut down everything cleanly after a few hours then brought it up later when the power was restored. The Merakis didn't like that apparently. I hate those things. I think our VP read about them in a magazine or something and had them ordered. Oh well, its not in my purview as I have shifted more into fabrication integration so its someone elses problem even though it messes up all my stuff... Though I'm still forced to support them when the other guy isn't around.

[Robotron2k84]

[arrix]

I'm using a WiFi 6 Netgear cable modem. It's worked well enough so far. The range is probably 50% better than my old 802.11ac modem.