In February I upgraded my home network to Gig E. The speed is great. However, a couple of days ago I woke up to find a bunch of my machines unreachable on the local network. I went downstairs and my SMC 8508-T had croaked. It looks like at 10:30pm on Thursday evening it just stopped functioning for all gigabit devices. No link, nothing.

After flirting with the idea of upgrading to a layer 2 or layer 3 managed switch I decided that a simple RMA really was the best thing to do. In the process I found out there are two 8508-T versions out there. I have 751.0154 but there is also a 751.7513 version. Interestingly, I was never able to get jumbo frames to work as advertised on my switch. It’ll be interesting to see if the one I get back works for jumbo frames. Of course I will let you all know.

By the way, if your looking to have a real switch (but not so real you need a maintenance agreement) at home I would recommend the Netgear GSM7224 and GSM7324 models. Very slick! 🙂 Go with the 7324 and you get layer 3 with fiber so you can get a neighborhood backbone setup.