I'm in the process of installing a Linksys SR2024. Is this -- or any -- switch capable of monitoring and logging transmission errors such as retries?
In other words, is there any way to monitor the switch and see, for example, a connection problem that might start to show up as transmission errors?
Is this monitoring & logging capability available on less than the most spendy models?
Thanks.
Switches come in 2 flavours: managed and unmanaged.
If you buy a managed switch, you can logon to it's console and manage it. Which means a.o. see what happens and install or enable trapping. (SNMP)
If you buy an unmanaged switch, the only serves the box provides is 'switching'. (Although some manage to provide smoke signals if something really goes wrong :-)
I haven't done this, but every OS can be set up to gather these statistics and a Net Management app could pull these numbers. Setting up ALL the machines would accomplsh what you seem to want. Microsoft Net Manager, included in some Windows server kits and availalbel as a stand-alone product can do this.
For Windows, every machine somes with PerfMon. Perfom is an underapprciated tolll that can do lots to monitor all the counters on the system and send alerts to a central server.
I'm a fan of simple managed switches and I like HP Procurve boxes. Older ones are really cheap on Ebay and they have a lifetime warranty so it's hard to go wrong. (RTFM, Some low-end models don't have management.)
Actually, nowadays switches tend to come in three flavours, Unmanaged, Web Managed and Managed. This is due to the artificially inflated prices many manufacturers take for the "managed" switches.
The middle tier, often called "Web Managed", provides configuration and often statistics via a Web interface and/or command line, but doesn't do SNMP so it's much harder (or impossible) to do central monitoring, alerting and management.
Also, some unmanaged switches used to be underprovisioned and many of the small/cheap/less known brand "mini" switches (5/8-port) tends to have unacceptable failure rates for a business net in my experience.
Web Managed can be a good choice especially for smaller networks (one or two switches) where central management & monitoring is much less likely to be in place (and/or a major factor).
It really shouldn't cost much to add the SNMP capabilities to get to "Managed", most of cost is a "sunk" cost for the initial software development... But those switches can be priced based on the extra value they bring to someone with more switches.
Personally I'm wary of the Linksys and D-Link "business" switch, even if people do report that they're somewhat less flaky than their consumer units.
So far I've always found gear from bigger network hardware manufacturers I've used before at similar price points (HP, know less about SMC but what I've seen looks good. OTOH CERTAINLY *not* 3Com, still has the scars from those), so I've seen no need.
Cisco equipment works, but is a lot more expensive and you need an active support contract to get software (except security fixes, which is pretty rare on the L2 side).
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