No routes to host
May 25th, 2005The 8-port 10/100 network switch that I bought years ago has finally failed. A few days ago, I noticed short, intermittent chirping noises (like a water faucet pulsing white noise for a fraction of a second), and localized it to the switch. I don’t think the switch has any moving parts, so I couldn’t figure out what it was.
Tonight, the chirping noises became more frequent, and I heard humming from the switch. Seems like a bad sign, I thought.
Then, it failed. Power wasn’t getting through to any of the circuits, and all the machines on my network lost their network connection (except of course, the trusty PowerMac 7600 I use as a router and firewall). Disconnecting power from the switch and reconnecting it showed faint blinkenlights on only two of the ports.
Nuts!
Luckily, I had a spare 5-port mini hub that I was keeping around in case I wanted to cascade more machines to the network. There aren’t enough ports to keep everything connected now as before, so the laptops sacrificed their connections. Also, the hub is an older device that only supports 10BASE-T, while the busted switch gave me a good 100BASE-TX network (pretty much all my networked computers can go 100 Mbps, at least). I can see the red collision light on the hub pulsing and flashing like never before… the switch would not have given me such nonsense.
I need to find an inexpensive replacement fast!
