Network Nightmares

Today has been one of those days in which I wish I never bothered getting out of bed in the morning. Besides waking up with one of my headaches, I got to school only to find that the problem we had with the school network on Friday afternoon had re-appeared, rendering the entire network unusable.

What problem with the network I hear you ask? Well, I was hoping to write a post all about it on Friday (my birthday), but I didn't get home until late and to be honest, I had just about had enough with computers. Not only that, but my parents had come over to stay as well, so I didn't touch the computer much.

Anyway, back to the problem ( I will try and keep this as non-technobabble friendly as I can) :-

Late Friday afternoon, during lesson time the school network decided to slow to a complete halt. Students were unable to access their user areas, and any work that they had just done could not be saved. We thought we cured it by stopping and restarting the Anti-Virus service on one of our servers (as this had caused problems in the past - bloody SOPHOS). It seemed to work fine for the rest of day..... That is until this morning.

I got to school at 8.00am, and went round switching on all the computers in the classrooms, as I normally do. All seemed fine, until about 10.00am when all of a sudden the network started to slow down again. Activity lights began blinking and flashing like mad in our network cabinet.

To cut a long story short, and after lots of prodding, swapping patch cables, fibre links, tweaking MS Server 2003, pinging, resetting switches, and lots of tea, swearing, and general shouting, we think we found the cause of all of our problems - a faulty module in one of our switches within the cabinet!!!

Believe me, its a complete nightmare when you are left all alone to maintain a network of over 500 or so computers and something like this happens. It doesn't help when every couple of minutes the phone rings with someone saying 'Is the network down', or 'how long before I can use the computers again'. JUST LEAVE ME ALONE AND LET US FIX IT!!!!

As you can see from the picture above, I thought I'd let an expert have a go at trying to find the problem!! I had to have Kieran with me at school for an hour while Michelle went to work and as you can see from the pictures below he had a fantastic time running around one of our IT rooms, and playing with the computers!




I'm now going to resume my task of scanning every single issue of DC Star Trek comics - I just hope my poor scanner can take the abuse - I've already done 46 issues. Only a couple hundred or so more to do.