A big company decided to rewire their entire network on their own. Even though they are one of our respected customers, the task did not deter their thinking that DIY was a reasonable idea. For 20 years, we have watched, commented and understood that DIY is OK when you purchase a single smartphone, not a good idea for office communications.
We received the ‘please help’ call early Monday morning saying that their VoIP and office was down. After spending some time rewiring their rewiring and documenting their office layout, we discovered a freaky thing about their Linksys switch. Please note that we like the product however wanted to share this cautionary experience. If you want to avoid confusion, stop reading now. However, if you would like to be amused with geek-speak, here is the note found on the internet.
“A small nuance when daisy-chaining switches through the uplink port… With the older ones, the port marked “uplink” and the port right next to it are in fact the same logical port, just that the uplink jack is cross-wired for the uplinkage between switches while the main numbered port is straight-wired for a standard Ethernet connection. That means you can’t plug a device into that port if the uplink jack is in use, but instead you must leave that particular numbered port unused. By way of physical description, if the uplink port is beside port 1, that means port 1 is either uplink or device, but not both. (This is why a 4 (or 8)-port switch has 5 (or 9) jacks on the back.)”
Got a question, thinking of a small change, call us. We really enjoy helping you.
