Faulty switch?

[james1990]

Firstly, I am aware that I am posting this in the wrong forum. Mods, if there is a correct forum for this please move thread accordingly.

I recently bought a 24 port 10/100 switch made by Planet communications, model no. FNSW-2400S. When the switch is first powered on it works great. However after 15 minutes or so it seems to lose connectivity. To bring it back I need to manually reset it using the button on the front.

Obviously, this is incredibly annoying, so I was wondering what you thoughts on it are.

Please help!!

Many Thanks, James

 

[BuckWeet]

I bought some SMC switches that did this.. NOt sure what the problem was.. I got em cheap, so I ended up just tossing them in the trash..

 

[NetworkGhost]

STP Problem? Is this switch connected to other switches?

 

[james1990]

Not exactly...

I had my router plugged into the switch using a straight through cable.

Do you think that this will have messed up the switch?

Many Thanks, James

 

[PalmTest]

When you loose connectivity to the switch, and you wait for 10 more minutes, is connectivity comming back? If so, take a look at the Broadcast Storm control settings. I know that you can't let your whole network down for 10 minutes, so try it on a test switch.

The straight-through cable between Router and Switch is Ok.
Between routers you need Crossover cable and between switches you need Crossover cables.

Are the speed settings correct? Set the Interfaces on both sides of the cable at 100Mb Full Duplex.
Also take a look at the VLAN settings.
Is your switch configured with an IP address? Perhaps another host is using the same IP address.

 

[james1990]

Ok, I've run a series of tests tonight:

I connected up a laptop and desktop to the switch, gave them static ip's then pinged them every 5 seconds for one hour. The switch was fine.

I then brought a router into the mix. The switch was fine.

And, finally, I brought my server in, at first it was fine, but the switch locked up after a while, which was also when I tried to access a file on the server.

Any thoughts?

Many Thanks, James

 

[NetworkGhost]

Whats happen if you take that server back off? Does it continue to work again? Can you access files from desktop to desktop?

 

[james1990]

Yeh, I can access files desktop to desktop, its just when I try to access files on my server the switch locks up.
Any thoughts?

Many Thanks for your help, James

 

[jfrantz]

Just a stab in the dark but have you checked the duplex settings? Having one side set for full-duplex and the other set for half-duplex can cause odd problems like this. Also, I've seen auto-speed negotiation cause odd problems. For the server's NIC and the server's switch port, manually set the duplex and speed.

-Jeff

 

[james1990]

Ok, after a little more fiddling around with various network cards I've reached the conclusion that the switch is indeed duff.

I was copying stuff across a couple of PC's and the switch froze again. So therefore, it cannot be the server at fault.

I am now using the network perfectly using a brand new Linksys switch!!

Many thanks for all your help!

James

 

[PalmTest]

Perhaps the memory of the faulty switch was defect.
When the switch has little to do, the faulty memory regions probably were not used. When the switch got more to do it needed (allocated) more memory, and addresses the faulty region.
I have seen this in Workstations with a good SIMM in slot A and a faulty SIMM in slot B.