Network Trouble Shooting help.

[Robert Meyer]

First and foremost, if you have stuff that is mixing 10 and 100 connections,
force EVERYTHING to half duplex.  If you have mixed full and half duplex
running, you WILL get gajillions (estimated) FCS errors that will invisibly
chew  MASSIVE amounts of bandwidth.  If you are running a 100MB only network
force EVERYTHING to FULL duplex.  That includes the switches if you can control
them and the NICs on the PCs.  Besides the invisible bandwidth loss,
occasionally an FCS will come out as valid, even though the packet is
corrupted.  In this case, you can corrupt files without having a clue that it
happened.  We had this happening at Kodak when I was there years ago.  The
switches were all talking to each other with 100baseT-FD but the client
workstations were using 10BaseT-HD.  We corrupted a mess of AutoCAD drawings
over the period of two weeks.

Cheers!

Bob

--- Greg Neumann <dadneumann at adelphia.net> wrote:
> Anybody know anybody qualified to do network trouble shooting for a 
> Windows 2000/XP setup?
> Intuit tech supports blames network hardware/settings for troubles we're 
> having. I don't have the equipment or real expertise to do this. It's a 
> very small network setup, 11 pc's, (one pretending to be a 
> server,another pretending to be a firewall), 2 print servers, one 
> networked printer connected by various 10/100 8 port switches. I've 
> checked all that I can (looks like it's connected, the status lights 
> show "good", pings go through in good time) but ... I can't find any of 
> the "lag" or bandwidth hogging processes that Intuit insists is causing 
> the problems. I've gone so far as to disconnect everything but the 
> server and a single workstation.
> Anyway, as this could be marginal hardware, and I have no tools for 
> checking that, I've been asked to seek outside assistance.
> Runs TCP/IP in a Win2000 environment. NO active Linux boxes connected, 
> and I'm not real familiar w/ network troubleshooting tools. This will, 
> of course, pay some money.
> Any recommendations?
> Thanks,
> Greg Neumann


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