I realize this may be off-topic but I was hoping
someone could help me maybe by pointing me to some
other discussion group. Sorry for the spam (I won''t
post back on this matter).
How can I detect if an ethernet switch is faulty
(supposing all the physical indicators are fine)?
Googling around didn''t lead to much (or led to too
much).
I''m asking this because our 300+ user LAN started to
"fall apart", apparently because of one single,
low-budget, 8-port switch. What I mean by "falling
apart" is that some servers and/or desktops were on-
and off-line intermittently, ie. pings would succeed
and fail in a random fashion. Also, some other hosts
could "see" each other intermittently and others not
at all. Total chaos.
We had to shut the whole network down and reconnect
everyone, switch by switch. That''s how we determined
which switch was the culprit (actually we were
thinking of IP conflicts which wasn''t the case). It
turned out to be a D-Link DES-1008D switch which was
connected to our main switch (for experimental
purposes). There were no machines connected to this
switch (except the main switch) at the time of the
network breakdown but there had been previously; it
was merely turned on.
Instead of just throwing the switch away, I''d like to
learn from it. Physically there doesn''t seem to be
anything wrong with it. So are there any software
tools I can use to detect this type of problems?
I''ve also noticed that at first when powered up, the
switch doesn''t seem to bug the rest of the LAN.
However, over time it ends up "corrupting" it. It had
been connected for a month or two and we realize now
why we had noticed a few packet drops once in a while
(but never gave it too much attention as it didn''t
seem critical).
Has anyone experienced anything similar?
Obviously, this is unrelated to Shorewall so I
apologize in advance and won''t post back.
Thanks,
Vieri
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