Re: Reliability of Networking Hardware?

In article <12094ggstp5pu6a@news.supernews.com>,
snertking <snertking@snerts-r-us.org> wrote:
>galt_57@hotmail.com wrote:
>> Just read someones rant about how they need to buy a new router every
>> year or two because they get flakey and start acting up. Is this
>> opinion utterly bogus or do a lot of people actually have trouble with
>> equipment that quickly gets intermittant and flakey? If so could this
>> perhaps be due to lightning damage?

>Depends on the router. My Bay networks ASN has been chugging along just
>fine for about 10 years now....

On the other hand, I was ready to murder our Bay Accelar 1150 after
2-3 years -- and I'm sure that a jury of my peers would never have
convicted me ;-)

To answer a bit to the question about whether the intermittant behaviour
was due to lightning damage:

  Not necessarily. ICs heat up and that causes wear on them. Boards
expand and contract due to heat changes, weakening connections or pulling
connectors out of sockets. Wires or solder connections may break
or may oxidize (oxidization is faster at higher temperatures) increasing
the resistance, which results in increased heat, which feeds back through.
Capacitors (especially electrolytic) may burn out, sometimes quite
dramatically. And not as dramatically, I've had a number of inductors
burn out too. NVRAM can exceed its write-cycle limit. ICs can oxidize,
but that is usually much slowed by the protective material... but
oxygen can defuse through that. Impurities in ICs tend to migrate
towards an anode or cathode. Cells in ICs that were marginal at
manufacturing may fail in use.

  As alluded to by some of the other posters, you want to keep your
devices cool, and at a steady temperature (mechanical failures increase
if the temperature varies.)
Received on Mon May 1 00:53:40 2006