WIECEK%wharton@UPENN.EDU (Sophie L. Wiecek) (02/01/90)
Hi all, I am a networking novice with a weird intermittent problem.
Our setup:
Server - HP Vectra RS20, 155 Mb ESDI, 4 Mb RAM
Netware 286 2.15
40 286 HP ES/12 workstations
NICs - 3Com Etherlink II (3c501)
In the server we also have a Western Digital (WD8003) card, which is LAN B
(20 more 286 wkst'ns). However we haven't had this second logical lan
attached in a while.
Problem:
Network has been fine for over a month, when we put in the new file server.
Last week when I was away, users couldn't connect -- They got the "File Server
could not be found" message. But by the time I got back, it had "fixed
itself"...no one had rebooted the server while I was gone, and I couldn't
find any problems. Now, a week later, it has started again! I tested
all the cabling. I cut off the segment after the 1st workstation and
I'm still not connecting. I've tried a different NIC in the server, different
slot, everything I can think of.
What do I try now? I thought the next step might be to reconfigure the
Netware to take out the Western Digital internal bridge. I had just
left it there because it didn't seem to be disturbing anything and
we *do* plan to reconnect the WD machines sometime in the future
Thanks for any help!
Sophie Wiecek
The Wharton School -- Univ of PALARRY@VM.NRC.CA (Larry Bradley) (02/02/90)
Although I haven't had the problem with ethernet (not using any here), I have had a similar problem with ARCnet and token-ring, where I had two LAN cards in the server, and there was nothing connected to one of them. Eventually no-one could find a server on the LAN, then in a while it cleared up. This happened to me with 2.0a,I haven't tried with 2.1x. Just for fun, hook something up to the other LAN and see if the problem goes away. *------------------------------------+----------------------* |Larry Bradley | LARRY@VM.NRC.CA | |Communications Manager | Larry.Bradley@NRC.CA | |National Research Council of Canada | LARRY@NRCVM01 | |Networks Branch | | |M60, Montreal Road | (613)993-0240 | |Ottawa, Canada K1A 0R6 | FAX:(613) 954-2561 | *------------------------------------+----------------------*
CUTRY@STLAWU.BITNET (Domenic D. Cutry) (02/02/90)
Sophie, I case you haven't done this already, check the cable with the Novell utility designed to check connectivity from workstation to workstation. I believe it's called "Comcheck" or maybe "Syscheck" and should be on one of the diskettes (probably the same one as the compsurf utility). I apologize if you've already done this, but often testing the cable means more than continuity. In fact if you've got a cable scanner or sniffer that may be an even better test. In any case an Ohm-meter test is not adequate.
DOUGW@BROWNVM.BITNET (Doug Wilkinson) (02/03/90)
> >Hi all, I am a networking novice with a weird intermittent problem. > >Problem: >Network has been fine for over a month, when we put in the new file server. >Last week when I was away, users couldn't connect -- They got the "File Server > could not be found" message. But by the time I got back, it had "fixed >itself"...no one had rebooted the server while I was gone, and I couldn't >find any problems. Now, a week later, it has started again! I tested >all the cabling. I cut off the segment after the 1st workstation and >I'm still not connecting. I've tried a different NIC in the server, different >slot, everything I can think of. > >What do I try now? I thought the next step might be to reconfigure the >Netware to take out the Western Digital internal bridge. I had just >left it there because it didn't seem to be disturbing anything and >we *do* plan to reconnect the WD machines sometime in the future > >Sophie Wiecek >The Wharton School -- Univ of PA I just finished installing a 2.15C ANW file server with PCNET on LAN A and a Micom Interlan Ethernet card on LAN B. The department is using the Ethernet NIC for its own use, and the PCNET was connecting the department to the rest of the campus. For unimportant reasons, we had to disconnect the PCNET side of the server leaving the wire unterminated (not good practice I know.) A little later, we tried logging in to a few other machines, and repeatedly got the "A File server could not be found" message when running NET3. I immediately plugged the PCNET side of the server back in, and everything worked fine. (No more problems) The only strange thing I noticed was that we have another department running with two PCNET cards in one server (One for a local PCNET network), and it works fine when the Primary (LAN A) NIC is unplugged. Very strange. I hope this helps. Doug Wilkinson Computing and Information Services Brown University