2000 Server drops LAN connection

[livewire]

I have a W2K Server with a Netopia Cayman DSL router. Since adding this router to the network the server will lose it's ethernet connection after a period of time. A shutdown and restart will correct this for a period of time that seems random, sometimes it lasts all day and sometimes only 20 minutes and it's back to the Ethernet card flashing it's lights rapidly as well as the Netgear switch and Routers lights flashing. The workstations (XP Pro) can no longer communicate with the server until it's rebooted - start, shutdown, restart. It doesn't require a hard restart and the server isn't locked up. I swapped the Intel Pro network adapter, upgraded it's driver to the most recent and swapped the NetGear switch to no avail. DHCP is provided via the Router and DHCP server and client are disabled on the server. My DNS settings are the DNS-1 and DNS-2 of the router in the network adapter DNS properties of the server. I have seen a loopback address of 127.0.0.1 on other servers configured similarly but haven't tried this. DNS is running on the server. This is a 4 workstation network with XP Pro stations and a Win 2k Server with a DSL line, seems like a simple setup but this problem is annoying. Any insight would be appreciated.

 

[john1012]

Can you live without the router for a while to see if that is the real problem? Also restart any switches or hubs. Drastically, get the cabling for your network checked out and tested. If you are using a switch leave ports server and PC's at auto sensing. Does the failure happen always after a certain period of time, could it be a heat issue?

 

[livewire]

Thanks for the reply John. The network was running flawlessly for 2 months prior to adding this DSL line and router. After the router was installed, up and running I did the Windows update downloaded and installed every update after SP3. Once I rebooted, no more server, rebooted again and all was well for about 25-30 minutes. I replaced the switch with another, disabled the onboard Intel network adapter and replaced with an Intel PCI and newly downloaded drivers from Intel. I just don't get it, I haven't ruled out DNS, dynamic updates have been turned off, yet I still get 5773 errors and the files referenced in the MSKB are newer than the required versions. As for the cabling, I installed it and tested it after the install with a quality tester. The longest it's run has been a full day and I looked at it remotely at 2am the same night and it was still up, but the next morning the user had to reboot the server to connect. I have seen machines with 127.0.0.1 as the DNS address in the net card properties of some servers, does anyone know what the significance of this is?

 

[livewire]

I tried the loopback address 127.0.0.1 and the server wouldn't accept this address in the net card properties. I have a replacement router on the way perhaps this will be the cure, yet it doesn't seem to me the likely problem. I am still open to suggestions if anyone out there is advanced enough to make them.

 

[livewire]

Router was replaced and problem persists. Upon further head to wall banging I looked at the processes running in task manager. Sqlservr.exe was using 50% of the CPU during this down time. Turned out the server was infected with the slammer (W32.SQLExp) worm and this was really a denial of service attack. I do not have SQL Server on this computer but I am running Veritas Backup Exec 9 which uses MSDE 2000. MS Security Bulletin MSO2-061, downloaded this update and it seems to be working ok. Norton Antivirus does not detect this worm because it never writes itself to disk and remains in memory.