Network Connections Dropping

C

creepysound

Registered
First i'm going to say somthing you probably don't want to hear. "I'm not a MAC Guy". Thats why im posting here. :D

I could use help. Our company only has 9 MAC computers, which are used for our ART Department employees only. We have a mixture of OS's for them. 3 of them run on OSX 10.4 Tiger, the rest run on OSX 10.2.8. We haven't had any networking issues before. Only starting about 3 weeks ago, the mac users seem to lose partial network connection. They notice it when they can't connect to eachothers stations. Its also random. I.E...station 1 can connect to everyone except station 5, station 5 can connect to everyone except station 2...and on and on. When this starts to happen, if they pull up their network chooser to see if they can see everyone in the workgroup, they will notice that they can't. And even the users they DO see, they may not be able to connect to them. They will just get Time Out Errors. Oddly as well, they found if they try to connect directly by IP Address, they can do so. But not through the chooser all the time anymore.
Once again this probably started recently, withen the last few weeks. As far as i know, no new software or hardware changes have been made. I have verified the network settings on each machine, and the network router is new.At first they started to get disconnected from a Shared External MAC Drive thats connected to one of the MAC Computers (The system that has the external drive on it, isn't used by anyone, it just hosts the hard drive). We have PC Users in our web department who also access the External Drive on a regular basis, and they will not have any trouble accessing this drive or get disconnected from it, even when the MAC users at that very second are having trouble. So the problem seems to be isolated the MACS only, and i'm not sure why. Once again i'm not a MAC person so i don't know what i could be overlooking at this point.

I hope i have provided enough information so far. I hope someone can help me. Thank you for your time.
 
Alright!!! A PC person! Welcome...
Right on.

Here are some suggestions: (Hope they help.)

Your Macs:
1. Check to make sure you have or are getting the right IP address, subnet mask, and gateway.
2. Make AppleTalk active.
3. Make sure all have Personal File Sharing turned on.
4. Make sure your permissions are in order. Do other Mac users have permission or priviledges to access other Mac shares, etc...? (that kinda thing)


Your Network:
1. Is there a switch or hub between the set of Macs and the router, and is it beeing used solely by all the Macs? If there is a switch or hub, restart those devices.
2. If there is a switch or hub, is it beeing shared by all the Macs PCs? -And is your switch or hub configurable? If so, check your port configurations or try connecting to other ports.
3. Do the Macs have a static IPs or are they pulling them off of a DHCP server? Check your DHCP scope and leases. Your machines could be battling for IPs.
4. You said you have a new router. Was it before or after this issue began? Does it also serve as a DHCP server? If so, do same as #3.
5. Check your cables.
6. If possible, try running the a PC on the same drop for the next few weeks.

Again, I hope some of the things above triggered some sort of solution. If not, we'll look into it further in detail.

Good luck.

hastalaVista!
 
Hi HastaLaVista,
Thanks for your reply! I have re checked all the macs, network settings, IP Addresses, DNS settings subnet etc etc. All seems to be in order. Appletalk service is enabled as is all the personal file sharing/permissions.

The Switch that is being used for the macs, also networks togethers some of our PCs as well. its not configurable unfortuently. Connected to this switch is also one of our Windows NT Domain boxes (yes ..we still use WinNT :( ) The PCs that are connected, don't ever seem to have a connection issue so it appears to be related to the MACs only. We don't use DHCP on our network, everything has static IP's and all IP's appear to be in order. Physically i have looked at all the cables....the only thing i haven't done is use a actual RJ45 tester. Only reason i havent yet, since i figured 8 macs having the same issue probably can't all have their cables go bad at the same time.

Its odd since this only seems to happen every once in a while. I think when i posted was about a day after the last incident, so we've been good again so far.. So strange.

Thanks again for your reply!
 
I'm also a net admin looking for answers to the same questions. I only seem to be having issues with newer machines with 'Tiger'.

I have a very similar network config to you. Assigned IP addresses, etc. and have the EXACT same problems. Our Tiger machines just DROP the connection to whatever server they are connected to. I've built an older G4 into a Tiger machine for testing and it does the exact same thing.
 
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