It's a question I'm asking myself after deploying some Netgear switches this week. It's not a normal brand I use, but with the shortage of IT gear at present I needed 5 POE switches for a deployment and these were the best option.

Brand new switches came with firmware that's a few years old, so my first step was to upgrade them.

You can't upgrade directly upgrade from the V1.x firmware to the current 2.x firmware, to upgrade is an incremental process -

- Upgrade from 1.x to most current 1.x firmware

- Set a secure password as most current 1.x forces a password change on initial login

- Upgrade to initial 2.x firmware

- Set a new password as the old one won't work

- Once you're on 2.x you now need to flash the very same version again but with a different suffix as they changed the firmware format and this is required to go beyond this point.

- Upgrade to current 2.x release

Now once you've spent ~25 mins doing all of that you now need to create a Netgear cloud login for their management platform. The switch can be managed via app or cloud but this is only free for 1 year. The catch here is you *cannot* manage the switch locally from the web GUI until you've created one of these accounts and registered the device and got an unlock key.

- Once you've created your account you now register the switch, get the unlock yet, applied that to the switch and now you've got access to the full web GUI.

- Bang head against desk

- Curse decision to get these switches

- Rinse and repeat for the next 4 switches

I wonder how many people it took sitting around a desk to come up with such a process?