ZAP!

[Mark]

Quite today because: tons of hardware fried on Saturday.  Dell 760 onboard NIC's either 100% toast or only working at 100Mbps depending on how lucky you were.  Got a bunch of people to bring in their laptops & chrome books and my TS is chugging along quite nicely. 

Tried adding a PCI NIC and the display would not come up.  Have two PCI slots and the graphics card is in one of them.  Short?  dunno.  Just damage.  Finally acquired some (they only had 5) USB to Ethernet adapters.  Working on those now, but of course I need to get online to grab drivers.

FUN STUFF!

[Jeff Golas]

Check your network wiring for noise - you have an amp you can listen in on the wire with? Something prob putting out tons of EMF, OR one switch may be causing a ground loop - check the power going to all your switches.

I would also check your electrical panels to make sure you don't have a ground wire glowing somewhere. Its happened.

[Mark]

I been tracing cat5 with a toner all day.  I hacve some bad ports.  replaceing with a nice quality Cisco.

[Jeff Golas]

PS - PCI port issue - I think a lot of the modern desktops are setup such that when you put in any card on the 1st PCI(x?) port...they automatically disable the onboard video for the flunkys that don't know any better.

[Jeff Golas]

Ah...just curious what brand? Can I take a guess? N##g##r?

[Jeff Zylstra]

I been tracing cat5 with a toner all day.  I hacve some bad ports.  replaceing with a nice quality Cisco.

Wait.... Was this one of those "POS" Dell switches that bit the dust?  Sounds suspiciously convenient to me!   

[Mark]

yes, POS Dell!!

Long story.  Golas, you do have me curious about noise on the line, but I knwo for sure the switches are all fubar.  At least the Dell are fubar, the HP should have that lifetime warranty for the ports?  Wonder if this is covered by that.

On the dell for example, I have one port with nothing plugged in but the left green LED is on.

[Jeff Golas]

So wait all your switches are toast? Like a Power surge issue or something? Is there a UPS or anything on front of them? Have you tried rebooting em for s--- and giggles? Sounds suspiciously like a network loop.

(Yes HP's have lifetime warranty, Dells I think are really "Foundry" switches I believe)

[Jeff Golas]

I couldn't think of the name of the tool, but an "inductive amp" would be able to show you if any of the cables have some serious noise on them or not (like laying on a flourescent light fixture).

I know when I checked mine, they all had a little noise one way or another, but if one has crazy amounts compared to the others, that could be culprit.

Call me if you want I'm curious to know what's going on - I'm on skype too gn et  ic  86  (remove spaces)

[Mark]

Our entire network is crawling.  Takes like 30 seconds to attach a PDF from a network share to an email.  Don't think Skype would work well! lol

It's a long story and I'm still trying to get everyone up.  All I know is whatever happened hit the network equipment only - switched and routers.  Even had to reboot my firewall twice.  Same thing happened to our tenant in the basement.  He lent me some PCI NICs earlier to test, but like I think I said -- didn't work out.  The NIC's were HOT when I [pulled them out too.  Well, it was just one but I'm not going to backspace and correct that

[Jeff Golas]

Really REEALLY sounding like a network loop! Are you still seeing activity lights or is everything solid on? If your switches are in a star config, and you can possibly play around, try disabling uplinks one at a time to see if everything suddenly comes back online. If so you narrowed it down to a switch...then you have to figure out which port(s) are looping.

I had the nic in our printer-enabled fax machine go stupid one day and took out the entire network, and I even think I had spanning tree enabled!

[Jeff Zylstra]

Sounds like the WOPR is running a Global Thermo-Nuclear War simulation.   

Sorry, couldn't resist that one.  Just watched War Games a couple weeks ago.

[Mark]

There was defiitly a loop at some point, but I have LAG between switches and I've triple checked them.  I have a crappy drawing showing which port is with which LAG and where it terminates.  Everything checks out in that respect (as of now).

I have lights on for empty ports and I have dead ports.  I can move a cable from a blinking for to a dark port and it never lights up.

[Hans Manhave]

I hope this is resolved?  Has any cause been determined?  I remember our lightning strike three years ago killed everything electronic, from switches to NICs, phone system, CCTV to simple magnetic entrance door locks.  Then today the finding of a weirdly behaving NIC in a machine that had "survived" that strike.   

[Mark]

PS - PCI port issue - I think a lot of the modern desktops are setup such that when you put in any card on the 1st PCI(x?) port...they automatically disable the onboard video for the flunkys that don't know any better.

Coming back to this thread now, finally with a barley pop in hand.

This was weird. Was testing my theory that it was in fact the on board nic that was dead. Put in a realtek pci nic in one of the PCs I had easy access to. Knew the cable was in a working port. No lights went on & still got the network cable is unplugged message. Took the realtek out & it was very hot. Switched it with the other one (3 com? Don't remember) and got lights, feeling good. But the monitors never came out of sleep and it didn't even seem like the computer booted properly. Yanked the card & it booted fine, still without a nic though.

I ended up buying out the closest best buy of some belkin 10/100 usb to Ethernet dongles and got 5 workstations back up. Have 5 more being overnighted with my catalyst. This will keep us crawling for now. All of the effected nics are running at 100mbs anyway.

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