Internet/Sonicwall issues at our office

[Syringer]

We have an office of 75 with ethernet ports for everyone as well as Wifi hotspots in the ceiling.

Recently we've had issues with some of the laptops not working through wifi and ethernet, and some only have wifi issues (and ethernet works).

We're connected through a Sonicwall and a bunch of switches. The majority of people have no issues with either, but sometimes a few laptops will go down. Any suggestions?

 

[kevnich2]

You'll need to provide a lot more information if you want help with this kind of issue.

For starters, What exact issues are you seeing? What troubleshooting steps have you done? Can you ping your internet gateway (the sonicwall) during this time? How many switches do you have and how they are they connected together? Have you checked to see if there's a possible loop or broadcast storm causing issues? Have you checked the DHCP server to ensure there's enough IP's for the subnet(s)you're using and that you haven't run out? If nothing else, do some reading on wireshark and load that up during these times and see what it shows you as far as network traffic.

Network slowness in a business can be caused by hundreds or even thousands of different things, especially with all the traffic that flows over the network now.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Just shooting out ideas here:

Are your WiFi and ethernet networks converged or separate?

Is it possible you have too many wireless clients in a particular area that are overloading a WAP?

Is there any rhyme or reason to the outages? (peak times, Thursday at 2:35PM, etc.)

If it's intermittent, it's probably not the router config (if that were borked, it wouldn't work at all) but it's possible you're having performance problem. Maybe some doofus turned on deep packet inspection, or somebody's seeding torrents over wifi.

If a given laptop doesn't work over WiFi _OR_ ethernet, when the system next to it on the same subnet does work, that's probably something laptop specific. (Stale DHCP lease, bad network config from somebody working at home, MAC address blocked for some reason...)

 

[Syringer]

> (Stale DHCP lease

I think this may be it.

More details:

I assigned random IP addresses to the non working laptops and they work fine, e.g. 192.168.1.232 which tells me any new connections are looking for an IP to be assigned but are not able to get one.

So it looks to be a DHCP issue based on intial research..looking into how to solve that on the SonicWall side.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

NOOOOO!

Don't manually assign IP addresses inside the DHCP range!

 

[Syringer]

Ha what's the downside of it? And what's the alternative to allow laptops to be able to get IPs randomly assigned?

Or, any ideas why are laptops that used to work no longer working?

 

[PliotronX]

Ha what's the downside of it? And what's the alternative to allow laptops to be able to get IPs randomly assigned?

Or, any ideas why are laptops that used to work no longer working?

When more than one device has the same IP address, it not only causes slowness and persistent disconnections, it can corrupt files that are shared with either device. What you need to do is have the entire subnet actually in the DHCP range but exclude ranges from distributing them so that reservations can actually be set safely outside of the working DHCP range (at least that's the way we've always done it). A close second is to just never set static IPs that can be contested by DHCP leases. Source: every single networking guide.

 

[sdifox]

Ha what's the downside of it? And what's the alternative to allow laptops to be able to get IPs randomly assigned?

Or, any ideas why are laptops that used to work no longer working?

Any particular reason your laptops have to have the same IP all the time? If you are going to deserve IP, it should be out of DHCP range so that IP doesn't get assigned to another laptop.

 

[Syringer]

Any particular reason your laptops have to have the same IP all the time? If you are going to deserve IP, it should be out of DHCP range so that IP doesn't get assigned to another laptop.

We don't want this, but it was the only way we could get it working.

We ended up resetting the DHCP since it looks like it ran out of IPs to assign and we're good now.

 

[sdifox]

We don't want this, but it was the only way we could get it working.

We ended up resetting the DHCP since it looks like it ran out of IPs to assign and we're good now.

... Thyne network setup sucketh

 

[kevnich2]

... Thyne network setup sucketh

This is pretty much it.

As far as a PROPER fix, what is your DHCP server lease time? How many devices are on your LAN and what size subnet are you using?