LAN Troubleshooting

lordrel

Does anyone know of any good utilities to help diagnose LAN problems? I have a 30 or so system LAN (with a couple of servers) that functions fine most of the time. Recently, we have had several systems that will intermittently drop off the network. It does not appear tied to any specific system or hardware. (I did once notice that one of our switches was having collisions. A reboot of that switch fixed it). I am seeing nothing unusual on our domain controller to indicate any dhcp, dns, or wins issues. Is there any type of monitoring software anyone is familiar with that could help me track down the problem?

Ruckus

lordrel wrote: »

Does anyone know of any good utilities to help diagnose LAN problems? I have a 30 or so system LAN (with a couple of servers) that functions fine most of the time. Recently, we have had several systems that will intermittently drop off the network. It does not appear tied to any specific system or hardware. (I did once notice that one of our switches was having collisions. A reboot of that switch fixed it). I am seeing nothing unusual on our domain controller to indicate any dhcp, dns, or wins issues. Is there any type of monitoring software anyone is familiar with that could help me track down the problem?

Switches don't have collisions. If you're network device has a collision indicator, that is a Hub, and you should replace it with a switch.

Pretty much every utility you need to diagnose network issues is built into Windows and is accessable via the command line:

ipconfig
ping
tracert
netstat
nbtstat

Other than that, the event viewer logs on your DNS/DHCP/WINS server should provide you with any other information you need.

AngelHedgie

In addition, if you need more industrial strength tools, there are liveCDs and VMs designed for network administration, that come with tools like Snort.