On Sun, 2008-11-23 at 01:01 -0600, Kari Matthews wrote: > Hello, > > Totally has nothing to do w/ linux ... but you guys strike me as the > types who might know about this. > > I have a school that has called me b/c their tech guy cannot figure > out what's wrong w/ their network. They have a T line (I think T1, > but not sure about that), but when 20 kids are all on the internet, > they have slowness, or pages don't load, or other similar problems. > Right now, this is so bad, they cannot teach anything that involves > the internet. This prob is abt 3 weeks old. They claim no change to > hardware or software around the time the problems began. I found a > bad DNS entry, but that fix didn't really help. > > Long story short, I suspect there is a hardware problem somewhere -- > but pinning it down looks like a formidable job. This place is an > explosion of ethernet cables, a million hubs, and a ton of old > computers that have been donated. > > So my question: Is there any piece of software that any of you are > aware of that will analyze the network? It'd be nice if I could pin > the TCPIP errors to a specific IP address, though I know that's > probably not a possibility. > > Thanks for your help. > > ~kari > > Kari, I would go straight to the gateway device first. In situations like this that's usually where the problem is. If it isn't then something is eating bandwidth up. What you do if the gateway isn't the issue is get a HUB and put the HUB between the gateway and the main connection going to the rest of the connections. It absolutely has to be a HUB and not a switch. The reason for this is because HUBs and switches work very differently and a HUB will allow you to analyze all the traffic going to and from the gateway, a switch will not.
Take a laptop, with Linux loaded on it of course, and make sure it has etherape installed on it. Then connect that laptop to the hub and run etherape. Let it sniff the traffic for about two or three hours. Even a whole day if possible. Once you let etherape analyze the network traffic flow it will tell you what device or devices are hogging the network bandwidth up. --Shaun --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit our group at http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
