Internet Problems (An ID10T Error!)

One day I get a phone call from a rather flustered lady from our upper management.

"Hello, I am having problems getting on to the internet with my laptop." She tells me.

"How far are you getting? Are you getting an error?" I ask.

"Its says 'Page cannot be displayed." She reads. So far so good.

"Sounds like you are not connected to the network. Where abouts are you?" I ask.

"I am at home." She says alarm bells starting to ring.

"I see so you are trying to connect your laptop to your home internet."

Pulling the Plug

It's that time of year again when our computer rooms have to be completely wiped and reconfigured. We do this by imaging all the computers in bulk, one room at a time from a preconfigured image on our server.

All we have to do is boot each computer in to WinPE, select the image and away they go. They take anywhere from 50 minutes to 2 hours depending on how big the image is. Once they are done we name them, add the printer and move on to the next room. Sounds easy...

One particular year we had been having a few problems with the imaging freezing and "bombing" out halfway through. It took us several days to sort the problems out, including many late evenings and early mornings. Needless to say we were running out of time and we still had over 1000 computers to be imaged.

Now our "temporary fix" was to have a portable server in the room we were imaging. This was considerably slower, but it did the job.

Mid-Morning Down time

Every day for about two months, we kept getting reports of the network dropping in one particular area. All the computers would lose connectivity for about two minutes every day at around the same time: Roughly between 10:00 AM and 10:30 AM.

After numerous tests and diagnostics, we still couldn't find the problem. The cables seemed fine, and we tested the CAT5 sockets and even replaced the patch leads. The switches didn't show any faults, but the logs did report reboots everyday around the same time.

At first we thought maybe we were having power surges, so we put a UPS in place to keep the switches alive. However the problem continued. Replacing the switches with brand new ones didn't help and we were beginning to wonder if we had a faulty batch of LAN cards in the computers, although they had been fine for last two years.

One day after the connectivity had dropped again, a colleague and I were in the switch room watching the switches reboot all at once.