Causes of router/switch hangs?

[Brian]

The wall warts provided with those devices almost always handle power surges
and sags well enough that I doubt any sort of "dirty power" is likely to be
the culprit.

Long cables can sometimes cause odd problems, either directly, or indirectly
by causing things like lots of fragments, retransmits, etc.  I've also seen
and heard of various brands of low-end devices like that get goofy under
very high sustained traffic, and excessive ARPs (filling up ARP table
memory, etc).

Heat could also be a factor.

I've never seen things like this happen with "good" gear (Cisco catalyst
switches, ProCurve, etc).  I think the best remedy is to take this homeowner
stuff out of a business environment.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: gnhlug-discuss-admin at mail.gnhlug.org 
> [mailto:gnhlug-discuss-admin at mail.gnhlug.org] On Behalf Of Hewitt Tech
> Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 8:37 PM
> To: gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> Subject: Causes of router/switch hangs?
> 
> Recently I ran into two similar situations (or at least 
> similar symptoms at two different client sites. In one case a 
> LinkSys 24 port switch would intermittently hang. 
> Troubleshooting revealed that one particular connection 
> seemed to be causing the problem and the cable attached to 
> the port was fairly long probably 200+ feet. We decided to 
> fix the problem by placing a small switch approximately half 
> way along the length of the run thinking that the cable 
> needed a repeater which the switch would essentially provide.
> Within a few days despite our efforts the switch hung again 
> (and the Linksys switch was less than a week old when it got 
> replaced).