Brand new gigabit switch not working

[omeriah]

I moved into a new house that has Internet data ports already installed in most of the rooms. My cable modem sits in the basement, inside a media panel. The modem connects to a 4-port Linksys wireless router, also in the basement. The 4 ports then connect by patch cables to 4 slots in the media panel. And those slots are hardwired to each room. So...modem > router > panel > rooms. This works just fine. Until I put a switch in the mix.

In the office upstairs, I tried plugging a cable from the wall port into port 1 of a Netgear GS108 gigabit 8-port switch. Then I plugged the other devices in the office into the switch. Nothing works. (Yes, this stuff can all work wirelessly, but it's much faster plugged in and should be even faster if/when I get it connected through the Gigabit switch!).

Does the switch need to be connected directly from the router? Shouldn't it work fine going from the router to the panel to the wall to the switch? Help! I talked to Netgear support for 40 minutes and got no answers (from India).

Thanks in advance,
Newbie (Andrew)

[Suspishio]

To help you, here is my (slightly comparable) configuration that works perfectly.

Cable Modem --> Draytek router --> Powerline wallplug --> Mains --> Powerline wallplug --> Microtek switch

All the above is ethernet cabled, but not Gigabit. I have 20 Mb/s cable nominal speed at the router.

So what would prevent either of our switch solutions from working? What do the GS108 lights tell you?

1/
Cable run > or approaching 100m? Perhaps 20% less with all the devices/panels in between?

2/
Wall cable not Cat5? Do you know what's in the walls?

Have you gone back to first principles? Connect the switch to the Cable Modem and a PC to that; move on to the router; move on to the nearest room in the cable run and so on.

Incidentally, and you're probably aware of this anyway, the Gb capability will only benefit you with inter-PC data transfers and won't provide better internet performance.

[omeriah]

Thanks so much for the tips. I do need to "go back to the basics" and troubleshoot from the source. I will connect the switch to the router and then to PC, etc.

The entire house is CAT6 cabling. Very nice!

My office is actually directly above the media panel in the basement, so it's definitely not >100m.

I discovered another issue with a data port, so that actually might be the culprit. I fixed that last night so the switch might work now. I will check today. Theoretically, the configuration that I described should work, right?

I do know that the Gb switch will not improve web performance. However, I didn't realize how much faster it would be just plugging in (without the switch). I went from wireless to wired and it's blazing fast! I do a lot of intra-PC transfers with music files, video, and pics, so I think the Gb switch will help.

I know the switch only works at Gb speeds if ALL devices are Gb-compliant. Do you know how I can determine whether certain devices/PCs are Gb-compliant?

Thanks again,
Andrew

To help you, here is my (slightly comparable) configuration that works perfectly.

Cable Modem --> Draytek router --> Powerline wallplug --> Mains --> Powerline wallplug --> Microtek switch

All the above is ethernet cabled, but not Gigabit. I have 20 Mb/s cable nominal speed at the router.

So what would prevent either of our switch solutions from working? What do the GS108 lights tell you?

1/
Cable run > or approaching 100m? Perhaps 20% less with all the devices/panels in between?

2/
Wall cable not Cat5? Do you know what's in the walls?

Have you gone back to first principles? Connect the switch to the Cable Modem and a PC to that; move on to the router; move on to the nearest room in the cable run and so on.

Incidentally, and you're probably aware of this anyway, the Gb capability will only benefit you with inter-PC data transfers and won't provide better internet performance.

[Suspishio]

Device manager will tell you the name of the device.

For eample in my laptop, it's Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit C

The device name will say. If it's not there'll be a 10/100 in the name somewhere.

And yes, theoretically the configuration described should work.

[partha6]

If High CPU Utilization occurs in switch?

[Jason Statham]

I think it is a major problem with your system switch.