Question dreaded 169 ip address

[naviseyer]

So i know that the 169 ip address is when Dhcp server is unavailable but my problem is extremely sporadic sometimes it happens once in 2 months and today it happened twice in 6 hours.
So i maintain a network of about 30 users , 2 wide format printers ,2 office printers and a few desk top printer scanners. Most of the workstations are win7 pro a couple win10 pro. server running 2012r2
with 2 virtual drives. So i never had this issue until i changed my dumb switches from linksys to netgear. Now every once in a blue moon and sometimes multiple times in a week the network will drop
all the ip phones and workstations pick up the 169 ip address and i have to reboot 1 switch and it comes right back up. The event viewers show nothing. I tried running a second cable from router to switch & router to switch
instead of jumping from router to switch to switch. Same issues no change in frequency. I would say im a 100% sure its the switch unfortunately its a dumb switch so i cant figure out why or how it could cause this issue and why
it happens so sporadically. IF anyone has any ideas of the cause or a work around i would greatly appreciate it. I know it only takes 2 seconds to hard boot the switch but it causes issues for my remote uses
and i have 2 that are not very computer savvy so if something freezes it becomes a 30 min facetime nightmare. thanks again

 

[oczdude8]

Honestly, since it only started happening when you changed your switch, and resetting that same switch fixes the issue, it seems like just replacing that switch should fix the issue.

It could take alot of effort to figure out why its doing this, so maybe its best to see if you can take a shortcut.

 

[jsmithepa]

I like what ^he says, and why are we dancing around with a relatively low cost item, u running a business right.

It bothers me that you said "running a second cable" I hope you really meant replace cable1 with cable2, because ADDING cable2 to cable1, now 2 paths to same destination, to a dumb switch is not done.

 

[naviseyer]

What i meant by 2 cables is that my normal set up was from 1 cable from from firewall/router to switch then a jump cable connecting the 2 switches.

What i tried was running a 2 cables from the firewall/router 1 to each switch.

i did this in the hopes that since it was only one switch that needs to be rebooted on order to get everything back up and running that doing this would stop it from happening it still happened so i removed the 2nd cable and went back to the switch to switch

 

[jsmithepa]

Switch failure is rare, but no impossible. You provided no other indications that this is not a switch failure.

Top of my head switch/router failure can be heat related, factory failure to mount heatsink correctly, and a few years ago first generation switches with power saving mode can be trouble but that's a few years issue and not heard of much lately. Frozen switches are easy to spot because the LEDs stop blinking. Even at idle there is almost always some traffic going through.

Anywoo the fix is clear.