Hi Everyone,
I have a tech. support question that I have been trying to solve for a couple of months now, but have yet to find a good solution.
Essentially, I am the network administrator for a large fraternity that houses approximately seventy guys and their computers. A year ago the house was running on one DSL connection that, while incredibly slow, was solid and up 24/7.
(At this point we were using some Cisco 678 Modems and Nexland 800Pro routers).
Well, we decided to switch to faster DSL, which led us to Qwest. We got two DSL connections and used the Nexland to load-balance them. Unfortunately, the Internet connection would drop quite frequently, and rebooting the network equipment seemed to fix the problems. However, this would happen sporadically, and multiple times (sometimes in the dozens) thorughout the day...needless to say it made my life very stressful.
So, in March we switched to Comcast, hoping that these problems would go away. The technician came out and supplied our rented SMC 8013WG router. However, we are still having the same problems that we had previously; at random times, the Internet on all the computers would stop. I couldn't even login to the modem via it's IP address to look at the log. It's been a while (I'm on vacation and haven't seen the problem for a few months), but I believe that when the problem occured, the green LEDs that correspond to the different ethernet nodes were all flashing in sync with each other and constantly. According to the manual, this means that the ethernet ports are busy transmitting data. We had the modem replaced to make sure that it wasn't faulty, but we still have problems.
So, I've sort of narrowed it down to a couple of issues that I think it could be; however, I'm not an experienced network technician and I'm sure there are a lot of potential problems that I have no idea about...so please let me know and give me any feedback that might be usable.
I called Comcast and at first they didn't have any idea what might be the problem. However, the latest technician in the area told me that it could be an issue (connectivity that is), if there are too many people in my neighborhood attempting to connect. Considering I live right near a major University (Oregon State), I can imagine many people in that area are using Cable and probably downloading a lot off of P2P. This could be an issue, and I guess there isn't any immediate fix other than Comcast fix their issue.
My other possibility would be due to too much network traffic going through the SMC Router/Modem. Not only does this Modem connect my network to the Internet, but two of the Ethernet jacks connect to some Dell switches, each of which have about 30 computers plugged into them. A third connection goes to my console machine, while the fourth ethernet isn't used.
This is a fraternity house, so I'm certain that lots of bandwidth is used for P2P downloading. However, people like to share music and videos from other computers; for example, people will stream a video copy of a TV show off of one computer onto another (at some points, I've seen over five videos being streamed at once...at that is just what I saw walking down one hall). I imagine that this could cause a lot of network bandwidth and am wondering if perhaps this could cause sort of a communication jamming at the Router/Modem, where it can't process all the data and just sort of overloads. Could asking the Modem/Router to process all of those network connections be too much. When you add in things like broadcast packets and all of the spyware and other Internet traffic that gets routed through that one device, is this a potential cause of my problem. **** The reason that I am skeptical of this is because we had no such problems (with Internet connectivity) a year ago on our old DSL connection, despite having the same number of users. All of the problems started when we went to the DSL, and then followed us to the Comcast; maybe we are asking too much of that device?
What do you think is the problem? Should I buy another router to put in front of the modem to handle all the intranet traffic (someone suggested a Linksys RV016 [i think]).
I really appreciate any help, as I am a stressed out college student and don't really have the credentials to be the network guy. Also, a lot of the guys play online poker, and I don't want to continue dealing with them for losing their hand cause the Internet went down (especially since some of them make thousands of dollars per month and play big tournaments).
Thanks in advance for any help.
- Jeremy
I have a tech. support question that I have been trying to solve for a couple of months now, but have yet to find a good solution.
Essentially, I am the network administrator for a large fraternity that houses approximately seventy guys and their computers. A year ago the house was running on one DSL connection that, while incredibly slow, was solid and up 24/7.
(At this point we were using some Cisco 678 Modems and Nexland 800Pro routers).
Well, we decided to switch to faster DSL, which led us to Qwest. We got two DSL connections and used the Nexland to load-balance them. Unfortunately, the Internet connection would drop quite frequently, and rebooting the network equipment seemed to fix the problems. However, this would happen sporadically, and multiple times (sometimes in the dozens) thorughout the day...needless to say it made my life very stressful.
So, in March we switched to Comcast, hoping that these problems would go away. The technician came out and supplied our rented SMC 8013WG router. However, we are still having the same problems that we had previously; at random times, the Internet on all the computers would stop. I couldn't even login to the modem via it's IP address to look at the log. It's been a while (I'm on vacation and haven't seen the problem for a few months), but I believe that when the problem occured, the green LEDs that correspond to the different ethernet nodes were all flashing in sync with each other and constantly. According to the manual, this means that the ethernet ports are busy transmitting data. We had the modem replaced to make sure that it wasn't faulty, but we still have problems.
So, I've sort of narrowed it down to a couple of issues that I think it could be; however, I'm not an experienced network technician and I'm sure there are a lot of potential problems that I have no idea about...so please let me know and give me any feedback that might be usable.
I called Comcast and at first they didn't have any idea what might be the problem. However, the latest technician in the area told me that it could be an issue (connectivity that is), if there are too many people in my neighborhood attempting to connect. Considering I live right near a major University (Oregon State), I can imagine many people in that area are using Cable and probably downloading a lot off of P2P. This could be an issue, and I guess there isn't any immediate fix other than Comcast fix their issue.
My other possibility would be due to too much network traffic going through the SMC Router/Modem. Not only does this Modem connect my network to the Internet, but two of the Ethernet jacks connect to some Dell switches, each of which have about 30 computers plugged into them. A third connection goes to my console machine, while the fourth ethernet isn't used.
This is a fraternity house, so I'm certain that lots of bandwidth is used for P2P downloading. However, people like to share music and videos from other computers; for example, people will stream a video copy of a TV show off of one computer onto another (at some points, I've seen over five videos being streamed at once...at that is just what I saw walking down one hall). I imagine that this could cause a lot of network bandwidth and am wondering if perhaps this could cause sort of a communication jamming at the Router/Modem, where it can't process all the data and just sort of overloads. Could asking the Modem/Router to process all of those network connections be too much. When you add in things like broadcast packets and all of the spyware and other Internet traffic that gets routed through that one device, is this a potential cause of my problem. **** The reason that I am skeptical of this is because we had no such problems (with Internet connectivity) a year ago on our old DSL connection, despite having the same number of users. All of the problems started when we went to the DSL, and then followed us to the Comcast; maybe we are asking too much of that device?
What do you think is the problem? Should I buy another router to put in front of the modem to handle all the intranet traffic (someone suggested a Linksys RV016 [i think]).
I really appreciate any help, as I am a stressed out college student and don't really have the credentials to be the network guy. Also, a lot of the guys play online poker, and I don't want to continue dealing with them for losing their hand cause the Internet went down (especially since some of them make thousands of dollars per month and play big tournaments).
Thanks in advance for any help.
- Jeremy
Facebook
Twitter