Intermittent Pinging and Other Network Problems

[bkrosco]

We have a small lan with about 25 stations on a peer to peer network. Lately, we've been having problems with slowness and printing to shared network printers etc. After some troubleshooting it seems that what's happening is that stations are unable to even ping other stations for a period of time. Then, they will be able to ping again. One time, they'll be able to resolve by the netbios name, the next time, it gets host not found.

Any ideas?

All machines have antivirus software. I've tried changing ports on the hubs to see if there was a problem there.

Any troubleshooting advice? The thing is it's so intermittent. It happens very often, at least once every 10 minutes or so it seems.

There are 3 hubs and one switch. The equipment isn't great but it has really been a problem lately. I've started using ethereal to see what's going on but I'm not really sure exactly what I'm looking for.

I'm just wondering what could cause a problem that would even cause pinging to fail intermittently on the LAN. For example often the first ping will time out and then the following three get a reply. Sometimes, the first one goes through properly and the final three don't.

Any advice is appreciated.

 

[bkrosco]

My problem ended up being that I replaced what was the default gateway with a xincom and for whatever reason, it was causing pings to fail. I can't explain how because first of all, the xincom wasn't set up as the default gateway and even if it was, I didn't think pinging local ip addresses would involve the gateway at all. Using a packet sniffer, I saw a bunch of icmp redirects etc.

It definately was hard troubleshooting why something just isn't responding. All I saw besides the redirects was that sometimes there would be a response, sometimes not.

So, if you haven't changed anything lately, have you tried isolating it. Maybe put the two servers on a seperate new switch along with two or three client computers and see if there still are problems.