2007.12.30 - 20:25:00 PDT
I meant to post this a while ago, but never got around to it. If you've purchased a ZyXEL GS2024, and it came with firmware V3.8(LT.0)C0 I pity you. I too bought this lovely lemon. Long story short, it sucked. I was really disappointed when I had my new switch running for about 5 minutes and thought I had to RMA it.
I pulled it out of the box, fired it up, and started playing with it, and no sooner had I upped the serial baud rate when the hardware error light came on. Then it started flashing. Not steadily either, just random on/off. The second command I checked out was reading the logs. I found a whooole bunch of errors in the log about the fan dropping below threshold and recovering (many times per second). From running the diagnostics on the switch the fan was peachy. Sigh.
I checked for new firmware, but this was the most recent. So recent in fact (I thought) that it wasn't even on the manufacturer's site. The manual for 3.8 was there and released only weeks before. I'm sure they actually pulled the firmware down when they realized what a bad bug it had. I googled around and found someone else complaining of the same errors after upgrading from 3.6 to 3.8. I can't find the site now, which is weird. I was there numerous times and posted on it. Hm. I'd post the log messages from the switch, but mine are gone and the only place I knew that had them was that site.
Anyway, I downgraded the firmware and have been playing around with it while running version 3.6. The only feature that I noticed was missing was the ability to use ssh keys. I also noticed logging in as admin wasn't automatically in enable mode in the earlier version. Whatever.
Well, earlier this month, ZyXEL put out a bugfixed version of 3.8 which is available on their site [us.zyxel.com]. If you were one of the lucky ones to get your GS-2024 shipped with firmware V3.8(LT.0)C0 - well, hopefully you've downgraded, but now you can go get a better (read: working) version of 3.8. The version name is very similar - V3.8(LT.1)C0
I would like to point out that it's a very nice switch and I'm quite pleased with it now. ZyXEL was very fast with a fix, but it was disappointing that a bug so painfully obvious was put out, and loaded on production models. Running it for more than a minute or two showed the problem.
Update: Found the forum post I was talking about here [fixya.com]. The fan log messages looked like:
I pulled it out of the box, fired it up, and started playing with it, and no sooner had I upped the serial baud rate when the hardware error light came on. Then it started flashing. Not steadily either, just random on/off. The second command I checked out was reading the logs. I found a whooole bunch of errors in the log about the fan dropping below threshold and recovering (many times per second). From running the diagnostics on the switch the fan was peachy. Sigh.
I checked for new firmware, but this was the most recent. So recent in fact (I thought) that it wasn't even on the manufacturer's site. The manual for 3.8 was there and released only weeks before. I'm sure they actually pulled the firmware down when they realized what a bad bug it had. I googled around and found someone else complaining of the same errors after upgrading from 3.6 to 3.8. I can't find the site now, which is weird. I was there numerous times and posted on it. Hm. I'd post the log messages from the switch, but mine are gone and the only place I knew that had them was that site.
Anyway, I downgraded the firmware and have been playing around with it while running version 3.6. The only feature that I noticed was missing was the ability to use ssh keys. I also noticed logging in as admin wasn't automatically in enable mode in the earlier version. Whatever.
Well, earlier this month, ZyXEL put out a bugfixed version of 3.8 which is available on their site [us.zyxel.com]. If you were one of the lucky ones to get your GS-2024 shipped with firmware V3.8(LT.0)C0 - well, hopefully you've downgraded, but now you can go get a better (read: working) version of 3.8. The version name is very similar - V3.8(LT.1)C0
I would like to point out that it's a very nice switch and I'm quite pleased with it now. ZyXEL was very fast with a fix, but it was disappointing that a bug so painfully obvious was put out, and loaded on production models. Running it for more than a minute or two showed the problem.
Update: Found the forum post I was talking about here [fixya.com]. The fan log messages looked like:
SW-Head-Republicii2 system: FAN2 RPM value 6510 is lower than its limit RPM value
SW-Head-Republicii2 system: The RPM of the fan has recovered to normal state
SW-Head-Republicii2 system: The RPM of the fan has recovered to normal state