Network Nightmares!
Boy do I have one for you today! All right, check this out. Take a small office network, mixed Windows boxes, add in the need to access the Internet at specific times of the day, and what do you have? Stalled connectivity!
So here is the deal. My sister-in-law works for a small company that has been experiencing the strangest network behavior lately. Twice a day, without fail – at roughly the same time (give or take ten minutes), all Internet connectivity has gone out the Window. According to the local fill-in admin, things have been so bad that they have even switched out ISPs – still no success! The only remaining constants are the machines on the network and the router itself (SoHo type model).
Because all machines are fully updated and secured with some kind of anti-virus protection, I am thinking it must be something on one of the lesser maintained boxes hosting some sort of nasty malware? Personally, I am suspicious as to how safe any of these boxes really are using old versions of Windows and IE6. Seriously, this is always a recipe for disaster!
My two recommendations were to obviously run malware removal products again on all the boxes (disconnected from the network), but also to see what happens if all the boxes but one are disconnected during an event. Check the netstat for hits and see what the bandwidth and system resources are doing, one box at a time. Something like hunting for mice. What do you think might be going on? Has someone been feeding the gremlins again?
[tags]malware,gremlins,windows,network,isp,SoHo[/tags]
