On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 11:01 PM, Kari Matthews <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.
If the number of simultaneous users never peaks 30 or so, also look for compromised machines. If your windows hosts are part of a botnet sending out spam, then your network will be completely saturated with activity. All it takes is one compromised machine to start worming its way into the rest of the network. If the spam became too much of a problem it's also within the realm of possibility that your ISP throttled you down. HE just cut off a whole datacenter, which is the first time I've ever heard of an ISP proactively fighting spam at the source, but it follows to reason that something similar might be occurring. The reason I jump to the spam conclusion is because my memory of high school is that there were literally 15,000+ machines on campus, with 14 other schools in the district, and 3 district IT techs, two of whom had broken email addresses. I figure that means upwards of 50,000 hosts (read: anything that can connect to the Internet) across the whole network. Three techs. Cue Wagner as the poor guys get swamped! Also consider using some QoS to ensure that the annoying kid in the library isn't monopolizing all the bandwidth playing dumb flash games or downloading imagery generally held to be socially unacceptable. -- Registered Linux Addict #431495 http://profile.xfire.com/mrstalinman | John 3:16! http://www.fsdev.net/ | http://lordsauron.wordpress.com/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
