Hello my fellow networking peers!
My network is workgroup based, only having 4-8 AP's, DHCP is supplied by my firewall/router, and DNS is relayed through it. There are a couple of VLANs but not being used (for testing). We're in a flat network.
I'm currently the networking guy here, and there's been a strange oddity happening. In a nutshell, a few people with their computer would randomly lose connection to the Internet; but only for a few seconds. Sometimes it happens multiple times a day, then it would happen once or twice during the day, or none at all.
When the issue is happening, my boss (unfortunate victim of the issue) is not able to ping out, but I'm able to ping him just fine; and am also able to ping other machines that he's not able to ping.
There's also been reportings where the wireless connectivity to our warehouse guys would also be bad as well. The wireless issue isn't affecting everyone, just the warehouse, and a couple others across to another nearby location.
My computer is fine; and the majority of other computers are fine as well (as far as I can tell).
Therefore, I started to look for the physical lines:
- I know that we have another location close by connected via AirGrid (as mentioned earlier). That's not the problem.
- I also checked the the physical lines of connections; and I found that there were a couple of off-the-shelf switches connected to help daisy-chain the connection (with a few other nodes connected to those as well.)
- Here's the kicker. From what I can tell as far as the connectivity of the people having issues all seem to relate back to the backbone. The problem is...the backbone switches are unmanaged fast ethernets. The majority of the connection issues seem to be coming from the two switches in between the four stacked on each other.
- We're in the process of getting managed switches.
-Therefore, with the given knowledge and tools that I have, I check the firewall/router for issues and none seem to have arisen.
- I plan on using the "Microsoft Network Monitor" when the issue happens again.
- So far I haven't gotten any reports of connectivity issues today. Or they're just not saying anything (lol)
This leads me to a few conclusions of what "might" be going on:
1. One or two of those unmanaged switches are failing or a few given ports are going bad.
2. The unmanaged switches aren't able to keep up with the load demand from the network
3. And losing my mind on figuring out phantom connection issues :)
What do you guys think? What questions do you have for more detail?