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Isolating problems in a Business LAN.

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DMK

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Our company has 9 employees and probably 20 LAN jacks. We are looking for a more robust LAN solution. We have a single WAN connection through an Edgewater router. This goes to a single unmanaged switch. From the switch we have a DLINK wireless access point, and ethernet connections to everyone's office. In the offices are GigE switches and 8x8 VOIP phones. Occasionally we have a LAN network outage where no one can access anything on the LAN nor WAN. The solution has been to reboot the network gear until the problem is resolved. Is there a way to make the network more robust and or isolate the problems more effectively? If there is a problem with the network hardware in one office, I'd like it not to take down the whole company's network.
 
Occasionally we have a LAN network outage where no one can access anything on the LAN nor WAN.

From that statement alone I would point to the switch being the issue.

Get a new switch.
 
I suggest replacing the switch that you have to reboot to get your network going again. Also check if the features you use on network causes the problem or if you arent using STP or a variant of it.
 
Our company has 9 employees and probably 20 LAN jacks. We are looking for a more robust LAN solution. We have a single WAN connection through an Edgewater router. This goes to a single unmanaged switch. From the switch we have a DLINK wireless access point, and ethernet connections to everyone's office. In the offices are GigE switches and 8x8 VOIP phones. Occasionally we have a LAN network outage where no one can access anything on the LAN nor WAN. The solution has been to reboot the network gear until the problem is resolved. Is there a way to make the network more robust and or isolate the problems more effectively? If there is a problem with the network hardware in one office, I'd like it not to take down the whole company's network.

Are all of the lights blinking like crazy on the switch when it happens? Instead of throwing a new switch on it, try running wire shark and seeing what the network is doing. It's possible you have a looped connection, someone is streaming a ton of stuff, misconfigured/defective device, bad cabling or a list of other things. I have only seen a couple of instances where it was the network equipment.

Just two weeks ago we got reports of phone jitter on our enterprise class Cisco gear and looking at wireshark, we determined it was ICMP floods from a bad driver on a couple of PCs. With their MAC addresses, I identified the ports and had them shut off within a couple of minutes.

We took over a network that would go out all of the time. Granted it was significantly bigger than yours, but it just wasn't set up right. Once I made some common sense changes, it's been more stable than any of the users can believe.
 
LANs typically don't go down on their own. There has to be a component either failing from day one or some sort if other equipment issue. Look at the suggestions posted above as the lights will definitely tell you something. If you have switches in different locations, swap them around and see if the problem follows a switch. Then play detective and follow the problem to its source...
 
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