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I'm dropping packets like a mofo!!!! help!

H

HamSupLo

Diamond Member
Ok, in my home LAN, I have 2 windows 98 and 1 win2k machine hooked up to a switch. They are sharing DSL through a Linux router that's hooked up to the DSL modem.

The switch is 100mbps and all the NICS are on autosensing. The Linux box is running the Coyote Linux distro. It's also acting as a DHCP server and assigns all three machines with an internal IP.

Here's the problem:
Last week, I added the 3rd machine, which is the win 98 machine to the network. Plugged it in and enabled all the necessary network features. TCP/IP and Netbuei are enabled and so is file sharing. The machines can see each other ok and can share files. Speed tranfers across the LAN are fine. The Linux box assigned the 3rd pc with a IP and everything and it's on the Internet. BUT, it's dropping packets like mad. Can barely connect to the Internet and whenever I try connecting to a webpage, it times out. I do a ping, and it drops like 3/4ths of the packets on average. This happens like half of the time. When I can't get online, I have to reboot and sometimes it works. I checked the settings and everything and it seems ok. I added the 2nd win98 computer to network last week and it was fine.

Can someone tell me why this win98 computer is having trouble with its TCP/IP connection!?? It's also using a Netgear NIC, and the drivers are installed and everything is detected ok.
 
I'd say try another NIC. Is it confirmed to be good? You are using DHCP which means it'd be getting the same settings all the other computers are. I would think there would be symptoms on all the machines if there was some sort of routing error or DNS problem.
 
Woops! I see your LAN transfer rates are fine. Does that computer work fine on both uploading and downloading on the LAN? Have you tested that yet?
 
Is the third computer the one that is dropping packets to/from the internet? Or is it all of them?

If it is just that one computer, than I would replace the cable first then the NIC.

If it is all of them, you might want to replace the cable that connects everyone to the internet or replace the NIC that goes to the internet.
 
If no problem seen on any other machine, I'd check stuff in this order

* Try a different switch port for the problematic machine
* Replace the cable for the problematic machine with a known good cable
* Double-check IP settings on the problematic machine
* Uninstall, then reinstall NIC and Windows networking components on the problematic machine
* Replace the NIC in the problematic machine

HTH
 
It's just one machine that I added to the LAN that is dropping packets. Here's what i've done in trying to isolate the problem:
1) reinstalled NIC drivers and network protocols
2) switched port for known good port
3) swapped cat 5 cables

THe only thing i haven't done is physically remove the NIC. I think i'll give that a try and swap in a known good one. THe computer was problem free today; it got online ok. This happens randomly. Usually, I say 3/4th of the time, the computer will time out when connecting to the net.

I'm going to double check if the LAN transfers are ok. SHould i use TCP/IP file sharing? thanks for all your replies 😎
 
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