A quick note here for any others who may find themselves trying to troubleshoot problems with a Netgear GS724T switch and end up needing to run a firmware upgrade. FWIW, the problem I was trying to resolve was random intermittent connection drop-outs between ethernet devices going via said switch.
The first step of most network troubleshooting procedures is to update device firmware to the latest version (this eliminates a large number of known bugs in older firmware), in this case available from this page. That link is specific to the GS724T v3 switch, if you’ve got a different version just go over to http://kb.netgear.com, type in your product model and select the right option. You will also want to download the following two utilities:
By now you should have downloaded the latest firmware and the two utilities and saved them somewhere you’ll be able to find them again.
Disconnect all devices from your switch, leaving only your workstation plugged into the switch via ethernet.
Assign your workstation NIC a static IP of 192.168.0.200.
Reboot the switch.
Once the switch has booted up, ensure you can ping it at 192.168.0.239 and you should also be able to browse the web interface at http://192.168.0.239
When you log in you should see something like this:
The numbers in the bottom table under the “Software Version” column, which shows 5.0.2.16 above.
Now here’s the slightly fun bit. Depending on If your switch firmware version is lower than 5.0.2, you need to use the Smart Wizard utility to discover and upgrade it. So why am I calling this the fun bit? Because Netgear support don’t tell you this. They’ll ask you to use the Smart Control Center utility to discover the switch and upgrade it. This utility won’t find a switch running 4.2 (which seems to be the factory firmware version). And lead to much hair pulling and cursing. So there, now you know. The second little annoying bit of this story is that once you’ve upgraded the switch, the Smart Wizard utility will no longer find the switch and you will have to use the Smart Control Center to discover and manage the switch (or use the web interface if you know the IP address).
The rest is easy – discover the switch, select it, enter the password (which by default is “password” without the quotes), click the option to update firmware, point it to the file you downloaded and sit back and watch the TFTP transfer tick away. It is surprisingly slow, yes, but it will confirm when the firmware update is complete.
Back to the main problem, to see if the switch is behaving better. At this point I recommend you reboot the switch and connect to the web interface to ensure that the firmware has been updated. I’d also recommend a factory reset on the switch at this point – use the web interface, or use the hardware reset button on the switch. Reconnect your network and see if the problem is resolved. If your problem hasn’t been resolved as a result of following all of these steps, call Netgear, tell them what you’ve done and they should arrange a replacement for your switch without requiring any further diagnostics.
By the way, there is a PDF on the Netgear site that describes some of the steps in this procedure and the various firmware update methods in fuller detail, which is at ftp://downloads.netgear.com/files/Upgrading_4.2.x_to_5.0.2.pdf. So why did I write this post? Well, maybe I was just being thick at the time but I just couldn’t see anywhere with this information in one sensible set of instructions so I decided to write it instead.
Good luck 