Computers loosing connection

[jman9322]

Once in a while some of our computers lose connection with the server and Internet. On our server we have upgraded the drivers. bought a new switch. Made sure that our desktops are setup pointing to the server and gateway. The server and workstation network card are not set to turn off automatically by the computer. Our server is our DC running windows 2000 server. All workstations are running windows XP pro. but not all of our workstations are setup in the domain environment yet. I kinda of wanted to figure out the problem and get a few more things inline before I switched them all over to domain. When this happens to a work station sometimes a reboot will work fine, sometimes I have to run through the network setup on the machine and sometimes I have to uninstall the network card and reinstall it and it works fine for pretty much the rest of the day. Thinking that maybe the network cards are having some problems I replaced some of them, but it keeps happening. It kinda seams like it is on the workstation side. Im not sure anymore. any help would be appreciated.

Thank you,
Jason

 

[NickFerrar]

There's a big thread on this over on Dell's own forums - it affects a lot of people (although the exact problem varies a bit). None of the proposed solutions work for everyone (and many still haven't found a solution), I think a motherboard replacement helped a lot of people though (I think one MB revision was dodgy), changing NICs helped a few but not many.

We have it happen on a couple of our servers but thankfully it's a rare occurence (once every 3-4 weeks) so we haven't gottn into hardware replacements yet.

 

[xmsre]

I've run into this quite a few times, and have narrowed it to the Broadcom drivers. The version date 5/23/2003 off the Server Assist 7.5 CD is the only one I can get to work reliably. After going through a regular server assist install, I go to device manager, right click on each broadcom NIC, and from the properties page I go to drivers and choose update. I tell it to seach the DC, where I have the server assist 7.5 CD. This has worked every time for me so far.

 

[jameskdc]

There is a thread over on the Microsoft Server forum entitled: I get disconnected everyday from server?? with a reply from jrISTech that resolved all of the losing connection problems we were having on out XP workstations.

Suggest u take a look, might be of some help.

 

[jman9322]

Well I have tried everything I think except replacing NIC or MB. But to me it sounds like it is the workstations having problems because they lose connection with our internet connection as well. We have it setup where if the network is down you can still access the internet. and to me since that is unaccessable as well it seams like a workstation problem. The only way we can recover it is by going through the network setup wizard. then it is fine again. It seams like its not keeping it settings. Or maybe it is a combination workstation and server?

Thank you,
Jason