I know Matt Hartley has had his own Network Nightmares!, but he ain’t the only one. (Thankfully, I have managed to solve the problem for my client.) Case in point:

A small manufacturing firm specializing in small jet engines & parts (I’d love to have one of their 450 hp turbines in my car!) called to say that their network was “going up and down.” Every XP machine would either get “Network Cable Unplugged” or “This connection has limited connectivity” messages. Both of these messages pointed to network equipment as the culprit. So that’s where we looked.

We figured it had to be the switch, so we put in a spare. Didn’t work. It didn’t make sense that anything else could be responsible, except maybe for  new machines being installed in the shop that were causing power surges. But that hadn’t happened, so that wasn’t it. It was off to the races.

I went into the system event logs on the servers and found hundreds of warnings and information entries that went “link down”/”link up,” many of them in the overnight hours. This being an industrial area, I began to consider dirty power and brownouts on the power grid as the source of the problem.

But they had a battery backup unit in place, so that should handle brownouts. I went up and pulled the plug on it just to make sure it was doing its job and the network went down. Aha!  Problem solved.

Cheers!
The Geek

Have a computer problem? A question about your latest gadget? Click here to Ask the Geek! Kenny “The Geek” Harthun has been playing with geeky stuff since 1965. He’s a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer with Connective Computing, Inc. providing network, desktop and info security support services to a wide range of clients.