Walked into a client's server room and changed my mind about managed switches

I used to think unmanaged switches were fine for small offices. Then I visited a client's place in Austin last month and saw their network was held together with three unmanaged switches daisy chained. Traffic was a mess and they couldn't even tell which port had the bad cable. That one visit convinced me to start using managed switches even for small setups. Has anyone else had a similar wake up call from seeing a real network in the wild?

2 comments

2 Comments

olivia_chen3522d agoMost Upvoted

Honestly I gotta push back on this. Unmanaged switches are fine for most small offices if you just keep it simple with one switch and don't daisy chain them like a madman. The problem isn't the switch type it's bad setup.

foster.wade22d ago

three unmanaged switches daisy chained" - wait, did you say THREE? That honestly gave me a chill. I've seen a two switch stack go bad and that was bad enough trying to trace a broadcast storm. Three in a row sounds like a total nightmare, like one bad device takes down the whole chain and you have to unplug stuff one by one to find it. That client must have been pulling their hair out every time the network slowed to a crawl.