Lots of dropped packets and loss of internet on a small business network

kbiggers

Reputable
Sep 5, 2014
3
0
4,510
Hello,
I work at a small company with about 100 workstations and 15 servers or so for rendering and running simulations. Over the past few weeks we have been experiencing a lot of packet loss and latency on our network and we cant seem to figure out why. Originally we thought it was due to a high amount of nbns broadcasts and we turned all of our machines from hybrid node type to peer-to-peer in order to stop them from broadcasting. That kept our network solid for about a week or so but then today it started to show packet loss and latency again. We have not made any changes to the network since switching the ode type. Wireshark is not showing anything to have me believe it is some kind of network storm that is causing this. Its gotten to the poing where simply running the program "advanced ip scanner" will crash the network. Any ideas what could be happening?

Our specs are:
RV042g small business router
4 Dell Powerconnect 2848 Switches
~100 or so assorted Windows 7 64bit workstations
~15 assorted supermicro servers
2 IP printers

Let me know if you need any more information thanks!
 

kanewolf

Titan
Moderator
What is the topology? Are the 4 2848 switches connected directly to the RV042? Is everything run as Layer 2 plus some VLANs or is it run as Layer 3? How many subnets?

Is the firmware on the switches and router current?

Are there any LAG groups ?

Do the port statistics on the switches look clean for fragments and runts, etc? -- There could be ONE bad cable causing alot of problems ....

Is the CPU utilization of the switches reasonable (while you are looking at statistics)?

Is the load on one switch SIGNIFICANTLY greater than on the others?
 

kbiggers

Reputable
Sep 5, 2014
3
0
4,510
Here is a link to a network diagram of our network:
Network_Topology.png


The firmware on the router is current but im not sure about the switches. Currently they are not set up as managed switches so we cannot access their logs but we are planning on setting that feature up this weekend. I do not think we have any LAG groups set up and we have no VLAN and we just have one subnet for all of our systems.