Router turning offline

Good day everybody!!!

We're having a problem on our 3550 Series Cisco Router, it turned offline once in a while. What I do is to power reset the router a couple of times after verifying that every config is ok. I find it very unprofessional to power reset such equipment a couple of times before it recovers to normal operation but then I have no other option or do I?

Can anyone pls tell me of any software to benchmark the performance of my router i.e. bandwidth, memory, and everything else..I just want to pin down the root cause of the problem.

Thanks.

Hello derk,

Can you elaborate more on what do you mean by "turning off-line". Does it shut down? or do the interfaces shutdown? can you ping it? can you access the console? or .... ?

Specifically speaking, I can't connect / ping my LAN interface from my PC. I can access my router thru a console connection and checked that all interfaces are Up - Up. I've tried to reset the interface by shutting down and performing "no shut down" to reset the LAN interface but still the problem persist. I've checked my cable connections, then power reset the router a couple of times and finally it was solved..

I need to know the root cause for the problem and benchmark my router performance.

Thanks.

If the router can be accessed via console I believe, cpu is not loaded for a lockup. This issues can be due to the uplinks from the router to the other devices where you have auonegotiation enabled on one side and configured the speed on the other device .either you should have autonegotiation on both ends or hard code the speed to full duplex on both the devices.I believe this should be the actual root cause but to understand the issue in better way i need to know how your router is connected in the network and regarding the uplinks from the router to the other devices.check for the link speeds and link errors .

Yes, it could be the speed match of my LAN switch and my router's LAN interface but I forgot to mention that the problem occurs once in every two weeks or maybe once a month. I've just noticed it lately and such cause for the trouble is hard for me to find. The trouble is not even periodic so I can't consider clocking or speed configurations.

Thanks for the reply anyway.

You can download cisco benchmarking tools from here: www.cisecurity.org/bench_cisco.html

Choose it from the download list. However, I don't think that this would help. With my limited knowledge, It sounds like your router is rather hanging. Is the network/traffic heavily congested?

If it's possible, Try a test period connecting only your PC directly to one of the routers interfaces and pinging it continuously with "ping -t". Leave it for some time (2 weeks or so), see if it becomes off-line again. If NOT, then the problem is from the out side affecting the router (could be heavy traffic). If YES, then problem could be internal.

Other experts here can give you more advice.