Troubleshooting a network

For the past few months we have encountered sporadic problems with our office network. If you look back at our previous posts you'll find many posts on our trials and tribulations. Yesterday afternoon we finally started to dig in and find out just what the problems were and find solutions.

Our office setup is fairly simple: two Linux servers, one WinXp desktop that doesn't get used very much any more, each user has a laptop that connects to the servers with CAT5 cables when they need to, they connect to the internet with 802.11/b/g/n and we have other notebooks/netbooks and tablets that connect in various ways.  The various portable computers use WinXp, WinV, Win7, Android 2.x and 3.x. For network printing we use Lexmark MFUs and connect with 802.11. Here's a list of what we wanted to resolve: the desktop worked fine except it couldn't connect to our servers, my primary laptop had intermittent wireless internet connectivity and as of yesterday, none of the notebooks/netbooks could connect to the server.

After many hours of pulling cables, checking hardware and software, reconfiguring and testing we managed to resolve every one of the problems. It was tedious work but satisfying to finally get resolved. Here are the solutions we found:

The HP desktop had nothing more serious wrong with it than a network card that had come loose. We just opened the case and re-seated the card. Viola, it was working again. However, it still wasn't connecting to the network. That was next. It took a while but we found out what was wrong: the Surecom router we have been using finally failed. We suspected it was going for some time and it was the big problem. We replaced it with a Netgear ProSafe Switch and everything was wonderful again.

All of our equipment was communicating again and we were running trouble free. Except for my laptop. It turns out that the wireless network adapter wasn't working so we'll have to add USB wireless some time soon.

All-in-all, it was a satisfying experience.