Re: Dropping off the Network

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Hi Gregory,

Thanks for the reply, I will try what you suggested on the switch and NICS,
even though all the nics are the same in the workstations, and its only a
couple of workstations that drop off, however outlook sometimes goes offline
on some of the computers.

Will let you know the result - hopefully a good one

Andrew

"Gregory Orton : SBS Admin" wrote:

Hi Andrew,

Maybe I can shed some light on this for you. I administer a small
domain myself of ~35 users.

I have experienced the same problems as yourself albeit with a more
important piece of hardware, the SERVER itself!

It's unfortuanate that you have had to go through the process of
re-building computers and replacing floor ports and things as I fear
that the explanation is a lot simpler.

You see, although we have standards like 10BaseT for ethernet wiring
and all that jazz, the implementations of these standards in different
network hardware differes greatly amongst different hardware
manufacturers, and as such compatibility problems occur.

With me it was our server being piped into a cisco switch that was also
trunked with some cisco IP phones. The server kept falling off the
network once every half an hour or so and would only work once I
disabled and re-enabled the NIC.

The problem for us it seemed was that the auto-negotiation algorithm
built into the cisco router / switch had massive compatibilty problems
with the same algorithm on the gigabit NIC on our server. Whilst the
connection worked for half an hour whilst the algorithms thrashed out a
connection speed between them, they obviously gave up the ghost and
dropped the connection.

The solution it seems is a simple as turning off auto-negotiation on
your switch / router if you can AND on your client workstations. Or
just on your clients. Make it a static speed that is the same between
the two endpoints.

If that doesn't work then therre is a deeper problem that needs to be
investigated.

Gregory
icarus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Andrew G wrote:
Hi,

I have a small SBS domain with 18 users. Every so often nearly daily,
clients drop off the network and i need to reboot their computer, this is
happening to 2 clients in particular, the workstations are XP Pro, 1Gb ram, 1
Gigabit Lan Card, static IP Address, have been zapped and re-installed, have
changed rj45 floor panel, changed socket in switch etc, but it still happens,
most of the other computers never have any problems, they also have basic
installations without any bespoke software....

I am pulling my hair out, any help would be appreciated

Thanks

Andrew


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