Hmmm... I picked up an old Asante Readyswitch 5104 managed switch for my lil' ol' Mac LAN and I love it. It's rather large and has four 10baseT ports and one 100baseTX port. It also has a nine pin console port for connecting to a VT100 terminal.
The Readyswitch has a incy bitsy teeny weeny fan at the back that sounds more like it would belong in an aerospace wind tunnel as opposed to a four port switch that doesn't appear to get very warm at all.
What really attracted me to this switch, aside from its rather industrial looking appearance, is its vast array of LEDS. (I love LEDs.) Each of the five RJ45 Ethernet ports has a total of four LEDs marked link, data, collision, and error, respectively. There is also a power LED and a switch error LED. In addition, there is an eight LED array that graphically illustrates switch utilization. Very nice!
My only real dislike of this switch, aside from the enourmously loud jet propelled cooling system (AKA 1.5" fan), is that the ports are on the front of the switch and not the back. This is somewhat ugly in my opinion.
This switch is built to be rack mountable and I have every intention of seeing that this switch does eventually find a home in one. There's something about rack mountable computer gear that just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Anyway, getting on with the purpose of this post, does anybody have any experience or knowledge of the Asante Readyswitch 5104? I've done the Google thing and got a whopping 22 results. It's almost as though this switch had never even existed; there's so little information about it on the Internet. I checked out Asante's support site and could only find a little PDF file that explained how to wire the thing up. Unfortunately, any two bit hick from a small town on the moon could figure out how to wire the thing up. I need real information. I want information on the software inside this beast, the SNMP goodness that makes computer geeks giddy and grin with particular satisfaction.
Anybody know anything about the Asante Readyswitch 5104?
Well, this Asante Readyswitch 5104 seems to be doing a marvelous job with my little Mac LAN. Network throughput has more than doubled and I'm consistently getting upwards of 600K/second. This is extraordinary compared to the performance that I had been previously achieving.
On the downside, I'm experiencing a significant amount of collisions. I'm confident that this ailment can be remedied with a little tweaking.
Oh yeah, my routers DHCP client list appears to be functioning properly now as well. This was an unexpected side effect of adding the Readyswitch 5104 to my network. Nevertheless, it is a good side effect and should help in improving network performance.
For now, I need to update the various versions of Open Transport on my Macs and get some consistency there.
Still looking for information on the Readyswitch 5104 if anybody has any that they're willing to share.
As stated by someone with much much experience in networking: Collisions are normal. Perfectly normal. They even went so far as to wish that they were never givein the name "collision" because that tends to make people think wrongly about them. If I were you, I'd not worry, and just enjoy the extra blinkenlights.
Collisions are normal within reason. Excessive collisions means that there's a problem. If your collision LED flashes almost as much as your data LED, there's a problem.
I can agree with you on the virtues of having good networking equipment. I have a load balanced and conditioned network with Cisco stuff I got for real cheap from companies clearing out. It's only 10mbps, but it feels as fast as any time I used cheap 100mbps equipment.
I agree. I have a bunch of cheapy netgear and linksys switches and hubs that I'm replacing with these old dinosaurs from Asante. Once I get a serial cable for the console port on my Readyswitch 5104 I'm gonna play with SNMP and get my network humming.
Just haven't figured out which tune I want it to hum yet.
I want to optimize my network as much as possible. This means that I'll be removing the 68k machines from my network, moving my server to a faster more robust machine, installing a real NOS, and upgrading some of these 10baseT machines to 100baseT.