I got an asking for suggestion on an annoying network problem in a company. The problem is quite simple. The company is in a 4 floors building. ADSL router and DHCP server are placed at 3rd floor. Last year, there are 2 independent network for 4th floor and 2nd-3rd floors. This year the company want to consolidate network into just one so they bought 4 switching hubs for each floor and connected all switching hubs in daisy chain style network. Unfortunately, the network was so unstable. Some machines on 4th floor oftenly were unable to obtain IP from DHCP server.

To resolve this problem, there are 2 possible problems.

1. Too long latency caused by daisy chain
2. Crosstalk in the line caused by internal broken

In any case, to investigate this problem, we need to see all packets in the network. So I suggest this company to run sniffer software on 3rd floor and 4th floor to see what happen. My favorite free sniffer for Windows is Ethereal. The UI maybe not as good as you expect from Windows application but it is powerful.

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