[citation][nom]williamvw[/nom]Much as I appreciate your comments, I'll disagree with you on this one point and perhaps dispel the notion of being "bought" by Netgear in the process. You sound like you've been burned by D-Link purchases in the past, and I'm sorry to hear that. I'll agree that D-Link tends not to be the top-ranking product in most roundups. In my experience, they historically are on par with Linksys, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your viewpoint. In the end, though, I've had very few problems with the D-Link equipment on my own network (which is consumer-class, nothing even close to the fiber switch level). D-Link tends to be ahead of the curve on consumer feature adoption, which I appreciate. I can't make a statement about their commercial gear because I haven't used it, but suffice it to say that, on the consumer side, I've had no major complaints about the products or service over several years of use and testing.[/citation]
Years ago I upgraded the company network on the address I'm currently employed. I upgraded from bnc cables with repeaters to Dlink based 10/100 switches with Gigabit uplink ports. In theory it worked great. But given the feature adoption you mentioned above, the big DES-6000 switches didn't work properly with the DES-1226 ones until I'd spend about a day or so talking to a tech from Dlink and he had realized that the small 1226 switches couldn't auto default to the only link speed available if they're not connected to another small (1U) switch. One of the 6000 switches didn't even last a year before it broke. I did this upgrade about winter 2000 I think, and in summer 2001 I had a catastrophic breakdown because the switches stopped operating when the room temperature exceeded 35C. So we had to improvise cooling and whitewash the top down windows (old building ; flat roof) just to keep them working. Within the first 2 years I've probably had 4 or 5 switches replaced, and about 2005 the firmware started to malfunction ; all vlan data would be sent to the first vlan defined, and the rest would work normally. Happened on serveral switches over the course of a year or so until I had figured out the source of the erratic problems we saw as a result, and disabled vlan on as many as we could. When I took all the dlink junk down I couldn't even get rid of it! Nobody wanted it until just before I meant to throw it away, some dude picked it up for a private network he was building. That is what I know about the old Dlink switches. The modern ones are much quieter (means they're just loud), or they're passively cooled. The latter is slow, and the former type is fine and actually works. They've got one thing in common though except for the brand name, and taht is a very very complicated configuration console. If you've tried cisco or 3com, you know there are ways to make configurations seem impressively complicated without actually having to make it complicated. Dlink is the other way around. They'll make even the simplest task seem impossible.
As for consumer gear. We've got, or had, dlink desktop switches in use in a location where computers were hanging from a hollow cylinder in which network and power was distributed. We put cheap dlink switches in there (no noise, and low cost) only to find out that once in a while one or two of the ports would stop working, and you'd have to unplug the power to the switch, wait some seconds, and then power on again for it to work. And that's generally how all dlink consumer stuff works. Easy to set up, easy to understand, and easily the most annoying thing to have around as you always have to reboot it if it has to work.
And did I mention the dwl-900 (think that was the model name) ap units we had? coverage was rubbish, but worse was that once a week or so we'd have to boot them because they'd stop working. And one by one they just stopped working completely - even the utility to update firmware couldn't find them anymore.
In short, dlink isn't any good.
I've tried other noname quality products as well, and except for trendnet's wierd numbering on their cheap 1U switches, they're all fine and working as advertised. Just dlink isn't, at least not for many hours at a time.
Now the wireless is Meru, and the wired network is based on managed hp modular switches. It's a different world entirely.
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