Ethernet status2/24/2023 ![]() ![]() The key to improving network design is to identify a few of the most failure-prone components and reduce their impact on your network. With a few design tweaks, you can increase uptime and reduce the likelihood of failure. Here Are Quick Tips on How to Design Ethernet LANs for Maximum UptimeĮthernet local area networks are incredibly reliable, but every system can break. If there are any, they need to be investigated and resolved. Have your management system send a daily (or even weekly) email listing ports that have any errors on them. There really is no acceptable level of errors in Ethernet, and any errors indicate either a hardware problem in the switch or device, or a misconfiguration (such as locking in speed and duplex, something that is strongly discouraged in gigabit networks). For example, the port I’m plugged into now has sent and received more than 20 terabytes in 18 months without a single error. In modern Ethernet networks, ports don’t get errors. Network Errors Don’t Just Happen - Find Out the Root Cause They may seem to work fine but they are signs of old devices on your network - and they’re going to cause trouble. The same is true for devices connecting at 10Mbps or 100Mbps. Track down these occurrences aggressively, again using a daily or weekly report. (Possibly someone dragged in a 20-year-old hub from home. Some equipment, such as printers and Voice over IP phones, may connect at 100 megabits per second or go into power-saving mode: Configure your management system to ignore these exceptions.Īny new device connecting half-duplex is a performance problem waiting to happen. Monitor the speed (10/100/1000) and duplex (half or full) of each port. Gigabit Ethernet Should Be Gigabit (or Faster) Watch your reports, then adjust monitoring intervals appropriately. For early detection, this could be every 15 minutes or every hour. That’s every port in the network, whether dozens or thousands. You need to be able to monitor in two areas: port errors and port speed/status (including Power over Ethernet).Ĭollect this information on each port every few minutes. That’s an important first step because, without an automated view of your ports, you can’t be proactive about problems.Įach management tool is different, meaning terms and capabilities vary. When SNMP is everywhere, SNMP management tools can track statistics on every port. Be careful though: One feature you need for monitoring is Simple Network Management Protocol, which now is often stripped out of the lowest level of web-only managed switches. Make Ethernet Switches Manageable - and Then Manage ThemĮvery Ethernet switch in your building should be a managed switch. Here are three tips for managing Ethernet deployments that will help avoid problems and reduce network downtime for your users. Then it can be a great mystery and a business-interrupting nightmare. Easy to design, install and manage, it works flawlessly - until it doesn’t. Ethernet is a great network technology for linking users together in buildings. ![]()
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