Hey guys-

 

Realizing this is well outside the usual unRAID setup/support discussions, but since my unRAID box came up as a potential cause in this issue, I thought I'd kick this out to the forum to see if anyone had any advice or insight.

 

I, like many of you, am the de facto IT department at my small business. In our previous location, I had run all the Cat6 cabling myself to various computers/switches, and we never really experienced any connection issues other than the internet randomly going out. Recently we moved to a bigger office that already had Cat6 cabling professionally run throughout the office to wall jacks that had been installed in each room. Convenient right?

 

Well, out of a wired network of about 15 machines (all late-model iMacs), we all intermittently lose internet signal at least 3-4 times a day now, and not necessarily at the same time. The confusing thing is that the internet itself isn't going out, merely our connection to it. If I enable/disable the WiFi adapter on each machine, the internet roars back to the machine. But, whether you leave the machine wired or on WiFi, within a few hours the internet will slow to a crawl/disappear, and you have to unplug/replug your cable or enable/disable your internet adapter to get back online again.

 

Some more details:

• 
  - Office network is exclusively late-model Apple iMacs/Mac Pro towers.
  - We have a combo uBee router/modem from Charter Business Internet.
  - Running modem signal into a 24 port Unmanaged 10/100/1000 Mbps Gigabit Ethernet Switch from Monoprice.
  - Some offices split the signal from a wall jack through a NETGEAR 5 Port Gigabit Business-Class Desktop Switch to multiple machines.
  - The connection issue doesn't seem to be happening office-wide, but intermittently drops out on different people's machines at different times, but I can't 100% confirm this as we're all seldomly surfing the internet at the same time.
  - We do have a 24 bay internal unRAID network server connected to 1 of the 24 ports on the Monoprice switch for network storage.
  - I have bypassed the Monoprice switch and hard-wired directly into the modem and experienced the same connectivity drop-out (although the modem was also still connected to the Monoprice switch at the time).
  

Charter has been out to investigate the issue 3 times so far, and they can't spot anything wrong with the outside lines or the modem itself (they've replaced it once already). All of their external diagnostics come back clean, which leads me to obviously assume this is an internal issue. One of the repair guys mentioned that our server or one of the devices on our network might be corrupted and causing some kind of IP flood or something (which is why resetting IPs seems to address the issue temporarily on each device), but that's something I'm totally unfamiliar with.

 

Any advice from you guys on how to diagnose this issue further? Thanks for reading this far.

When things drop out, try pinging from various machines to each other and to the gateway, to see if you can localize the issue. It sounds like you may be having switch issues, and since even 24 port gigabit switches have gotten fairly reasonable, it may make sense to get another one. When it happens, look at the activity lights on the switch, and see if the blink pattern looks normal.

Purchase some 50 or 100 meter CAT 6 cables and run temporary connections that bypass the in wall wiring.

Your work around leads me to ask;

 

What is providing DHCP service? What is the lease period?