I picked up a used, as-is Bay Networks BayStack 303 managed switch this summer for $19. I finally got around to cleaning it up and testing it and, to my surprise, it worked. It evidently had spent its time in Norwood, Massachussetts and all I can say is that people should take the time to properly decommission equipment before it turns up on Ebay. So I reset it to factory defaults and configured it for my home network. These were, in 1997, very nice switches and came complete with a web management interface in addition to serial, telnet and SNMP. They also came with a number of serious bugs that were fixed with later releases of the firmware. This one had never been patched and still had the original 1997 A release. Nortel acquired Bay Networks years ago and they have conscientiously kept all the Bay (and Synoptics and Xylogics and Wellfleet…) documentation and updates on their website even for these long discontinued products. Except that you can’t get access to the firmware updates without a service contract. It’s not unreasonable in this industry to give away patches for products, particularly end-of-lifed ones, but Nortel doesn’t seem to agree. I’m not looking for a free copy of Optivity- their very nice network management system, which, by the way, they do allow for a free download- I just want an existing bug fix.