[thelist] OT: Network troubleshooting tools

Susan Wallace susanhw at webcastle.com
Wed Apr 3 14:10:02 CST 2002


Greetings!

One of my clients is having a network conflict of some kind. There appears
to be two NIC's on the network with the same IP address, although even
though I said that several times *out loud* none of the folks responsible
for the network seem to think it matters... :\

Anyway, as I have some experience with network administration (I stopped
doing this *on purpose* about 3 years ago), they asked me if I could help
look into the issue. What I was hoping to find is some sort of software
that would help with this task. (I am not at their location, and only have
access to two machines in the domain at console level.)

The immediate need is to find out which machine/NIC is trying to steal the
address from one of the web servers I am responsible for. Long term, they
have no network diagram, keep losing connection to the PDC, connections are
being dropped on the SQL server, and the internal network has been slow for
a LONG time.

Is there any software available that will help with these tasks that would
be easy to explain to someone with *no* real understanding of what they are
looking at?

The network is very small (5 servers, 15 workstations, 1 router, 2 hubs,
several printers, Mac and PC environment), the servers are NT 4, PC
Workstations are as well. They are a non-profit organization so something
like BindView NetInventory or the NetAdmin suite is outside their budget range.

My fantasy is to find some kind of "Network overview software for dummies",
which they can then use to explain to the people who *are* responsible for
the network what the problems seem to be...

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Susan Wallace

<Tip type="WebBoard Performance">
If you have a "default" installation of WebBoard (version 4) and are
experiencing slow performance, check the location of the  files (HTML,
Confs) in the Administration settings for the board. If the path is a UNC
path back to the local machine (i.e. \\SERVERNAME\Sharename\folder) you can
change it to use an absolute path to the files (i.e.
D:\WebBoardInstallFolder\PathToHTML) and that might serve to help speed up
the access time of the board. It helped immediately in my case.
</tip>




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