Project

Hi There,
I will be design and implement a network as as a school project. I am analysing problems requirements in network but finding difficulties to get ideas of problems in network.
I would be gratful if any one can send to me the main problems that occurs in networks to enable me get ideas of some concrate problem requirements in networking.
Thank you in advance.
Please kindly send to this email address. gvsa20@yahoo.com.
Cheers

A problem I ran into last week dealt with going from static IP's to DHCP. It is under a single NT domain using win 2000 member server using wins. Over the WAN, I would loose some workstations (win2000) occasionally after a reboot due to automatic rivat ip addressing even though the routers had iphelper commands installed. Still problem solving it, but a win2000 relay agent seemed to fix it thus far. I'm in the final stages of testing the new ip scheme.

Another off the top of my head is, if you have a novell email server and move it onto a DMZ, you may have problems with your clients (NT) logging in.

Hope that's the kind of info you wanted.

The problems a network might experience are countless and really depends on how well the network was setup in the beginning and what though has been put into it to prevent problems!

One of the most common problems I have seen in network setups is running CAT 5 UTP cable next to power lines, flurecent lamps, which generate an electric field strong enough to corrupt data and cause workstations to loose connectivity.

Another common problem is having network devices such as routers, pc's, print servers that are not configured correctly, causing them to send a stream of broadcasts trying to obtain certain information, e.g a gateway or ip address. These broadcasts then flood the network, creating a mess and in some cases I have seen switches and hubs connected in a ring-like method in order to achive redundancy(!) but without any protection for broadcast looping. In this case, once a device sent a broadcast, it will loop constantly in the network, causing major slowdowns. Try to imagine 45 network devices sending one broadcast every 2-3 minutes and having the broadcast loop constantly in the network... you can quickly imagine what happens after a few hours.

Then you have workstations that behave in a very odd way, sending various requests, flooding the network once more, because someone installed on them a cool program that does wired things on the network.

Network problems also often are related to security problems. An incorrectly configured firewall or set of packet filtering rules can have devastating results. Someone could hijack a workstation, server or some other device, and cause countles problems. In most cases, a simple change to some service everyone uses, e.g dhcp or dns server, is enough to create a mess.

These are just a few I could recall from my data banks [img]images/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/img]

I hope they help!

You should also consider checking the download/project sections, there are some neat projects I have done which will help you decide how to construct a network in order to avoid these problems.

Cheers,

We had a problem years ago where there was excessive activity on our network and it was difficult to track.

We found that one of our 98 machines was trying to become a Browse master on our NT network. The problem is that one of our Servers was also set as Browse Master and each was trying to force an election, over and over.

We solved the problem my turning Browse Master off on the 98 machine.

Hope that helps,

Tom.