ISP Switch Aftermath
Posted 11-08-2007 at 06:55 AM by Robi
There are two ways to deal with a switch in ISP, call us before or call us after.
I worked today with a company that decided that they would be better off if they switched to a new ISP. They called yesterday requested that someone come to fix their network. For some reason it didn’t work after a friend tried switch them from their old ISP to their new ISP. Upon coming on site it was explained to me that the new ISP was put in place and the server was working and could access the internet, but users were having problems connecting to the web and to the server intermittently. After six hours of working on the issue I found lots of problems.
1. The new ISP router was on a different subnet then the server
2. A second NIC was utilized on the server to compensate for the new subnet, the first NIC was still on the original subnet
3. The second NIC on the server had hardware issues
4. Both router and server provided DHCP
5. The new 10/100Mbit switch that replaced the old 10Mbit switch wasn’t compatible with the old wiring
6. DNS was misconfigured on the server
7. They installed Windows 2003 SP2 at bunch of other updates at the same time as everything else
I showed up for this job assuming that I was going to fix some minor networking issues but ended up staying all day to fix everything. There were so many problems that it took me a long time to isolate each one of them so that I could fix them. It didn’t help that the machines only had 128MB of RAM running XP sp2 on them causing me to wait for 10 min between reboots. The two problems that caused me the biggest annoyances were the bad NIC on the motherboard of the server and the old switch and wiring. It took me a while to understand why I couldn’t get reliable network communication. But, patience and troubleshooting from a new direction fixed the issues.
The process of working though issues like these is always rewarding when I reach the end and see all that has been accomplished. I enjoy the feeling of fixing problems and the bigger the problem the better the feeling. Just do me a favor and call before the switch over happens and not after.
I worked today with a company that decided that they would be better off if they switched to a new ISP. They called yesterday requested that someone come to fix their network. For some reason it didn’t work after a friend tried switch them from their old ISP to their new ISP. Upon coming on site it was explained to me that the new ISP was put in place and the server was working and could access the internet, but users were having problems connecting to the web and to the server intermittently. After six hours of working on the issue I found lots of problems.
1. The new ISP router was on a different subnet then the server
2. A second NIC was utilized on the server to compensate for the new subnet, the first NIC was still on the original subnet
3. The second NIC on the server had hardware issues
4. Both router and server provided DHCP
5. The new 10/100Mbit switch that replaced the old 10Mbit switch wasn’t compatible with the old wiring
6. DNS was misconfigured on the server
7. They installed Windows 2003 SP2 at bunch of other updates at the same time as everything else
I showed up for this job assuming that I was going to fix some minor networking issues but ended up staying all day to fix everything. There were so many problems that it took me a long time to isolate each one of them so that I could fix them. It didn’t help that the machines only had 128MB of RAM running XP sp2 on them causing me to wait for 10 min between reboots. The two problems that caused me the biggest annoyances were the bad NIC on the motherboard of the server and the old switch and wiring. It took me a while to understand why I couldn’t get reliable network communication. But, patience and troubleshooting from a new direction fixed the issues.
The process of working though issues like these is always rewarding when I reach the end and see all that has been accomplished. I enjoy the feeling of fixing problems and the bigger the problem the better the feeling. Just do me a favor and call before the switch over happens and not after.
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