Hi All,
Under a new login here as i've moved jobs recently.
Recently taken on network here which consists of about 70 workstations 30 voip phones with cat5 passthrough to computer.
Everything was running hunky dory but since Monday we've been experiencing some highly unusual problems.
It started as random network drops, the whole network would momentarily lose its connection (but not show cable unplugged or anything). Users on desk voip phones found their phones frozen or unusable/disconnected and in turn their pc wasnt able to communicate. Rebooting the phones brought them back up.
Users without the desk phones/pass through were able to continue working pretty much straight away but we are a call centre and all calls got dropped so obviously quite annoying.
Over the last couple of evenings I have upgraded the firmware on the major network equipment which consists of a Draytek Vigor 2955 & 3x Netgear FS728TP Smart Switches. There are a few smaller 5 and 8 port netgear small switches that hang off of these on desk pods.
The drops seem to have happened less often since then, however in the mean time we cleared a couple of small issues such as damaged cables around the network, but I find it hard to believe a broken cable could take down all 3 switches.
Anyway today things have taken a turn and the 3 netgear switchs are at random intervals deciding to just reboot thenselves kicking everyone off.. They do not do this together, but as an example all 3 seemed to go before 8am this morning at some point, then one went about 2pm another 3.15pm and another about 4:50 so not linked it seems.
I have syslog running on all of them to collect any useful log messages but nothing helpful or unusual is coming through.
I have another switch I have ordered coming in tomorrow which is going to go in to be the core than the 3 switches connect to because the previous it admin had them all going through the router which is obviously less than ideal.
Im really at a loss as to what is going on, when the first reboot i noticed happened i thought finally we might have a lead on what the faulty hardware was but then within an hour the second switch went.
Has anyone ever had anything similar? Any ideas what on earth could cause the switches to just reboot themselves at random?
I am thinking of downgrading the firmware on one of them tonight to see if this makes any difference and if it comes to it a 48port 3com (albiet old) switch I can try in one room to see if this also reboots. Again find it hard to believe 3 switches all became faulty at once, but also odd that the problem started so suddenly.
The only recent changes to the network have been one or two pcs added.
I have syslog collecting logs from all the switches and the router with nothing obvious showing up as a problem and mostly informational normal operation messages.
not sure how much hair I will have in a few days.
I would really appreciated any help anyone can provide.
At the moment I dont have spiceworks fully implemented but working on it, this problem kind of got in the way
Thanks