Got a call from a customer: "Nothing is working, but only on one desk in the office."
I poked around a bit, and sure enough, 2 PCs, 2 phones and 1 printer were offline.
Drove out to the customer, looked at the desk and talked to the manager.
Turns out they had run out of ethernet ports after hiring more people.
So instead of calling us, to save money they had bought a desk switch on Amazon and plugged it into a random ethernet port.
Its power chord lay on the floor, unplugged.
When I plugged it in again, the office dog came running, jumped up, pulled it out again and tried to kill it.

Don’t touch that, it’s a load bearing 100Mbit switch.

That ironically reminds me I still have to remove like three of those.

Every network loop I've dealt with in the last 5/6 years has been caused by one of these menaces hidden under a desk with too many things plugged into them.

I miss this blue metal design. Yea the grey ones are nice, but the blue always made it look a little bit more interesting to have around.

If you're thinking of getting a switch from Nintendo: don't. They absolutely suck as networking devices!

I don’t even have anything plugged into mine lately. It just sits there in case I need another port for something.

Please ignore my dust. I’m a terrible housekeeper.

Have one and it just won’t die. It does its job so well you don’t even know it’s there.

I retired mine from full-time service earlier this last year. It is still kept for emergencies.

I do networking in the industrial space. This is the most truest statement on the internet.

Edit: for clarification I don’t put these in place. Most of my job is doing audits and telling people to get rid of them and then replacing them.

I stopped using one of these late last year, only cuz I needed more than 5 ports lmao. It still works fine.

Got one of these keeping a connection good right now.

200M fibre drop and networking cab are at opposite ends of the house. When the drop was put in, I only had cat5 available to join the two. Distance makes only 100M link possible with the crappy cable to hand.

Through the magic of being cheap and having one of these bad boys spare - two crappy cables with this in-between gets the full beans out of the connection.

It's been 3 months. It's shoved in a corner that the cats (fluffy version) love to sit in. I have cat6 to hand now. I don't need this anymore. I can fix it properly.

But it works and I just cba to do a new direct run.

I bought 2 of these on clearance from somewhere for like 5 bucks thinking I would never use them. Years later, and a few more years in storage, they are both still going strong.

The old adage "There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution" still applies.

If the business relies on the availability of the thing that's receiving a temporary fix, you can be your ass someone, somewhere, is declining the downtime to fix it properly once it's up and running.

I worked on a site once that had a 5 port hub (NOT switch) at one end of their network. One of the workstations kept reloading its roaming profile and killed everything else attached to the hub. The client couldn't understand what the problem was no matter how many times I explained it.

I have two of these running now. They're both at least ten years old. I think one of them was salvaged from the storage room at work. Gigabit is plenty fast enough for my home network.

Everything is temporary, man . . .

I still keep a couple of these in the boot of the car just in case someone needs it.

Refusing payment for it was probably the cheapest way to end up with free cocoa for life from the coffee shop or regular attabois (and the passkey) from the chicken shop with the fast wifi next to the arcade bar.

Can someone explain and maybe point me to a book or resource where I can learn more about the physical world of networking?

At work when we did a rip and replace last year, most of these were replaced with unfi flex minis because it was easier to do this than run new cables to do it properly, which was the reason little netgears like this were there in the first place

I've had the same one daisy chained for 20 years

I have a box full of the grey 'managed' versions of these. I don't miss them. Unless I threw it away.

why's that?