First, the background…
I’m a IT personnel administrating,in a media outfit, a network of 80 macs and 20 pcs. The network os is winnt 4.0
The Problem:
It all started late one rain storm night. When I got to the office the next day, I discovered that some systems; the pdc, a standalone server, and a mac had fried network cards. Small thing, I thought – these were replaced.
Later that day,a segment of the network (using macs in a seperate building) reported intermittent network connectivity. The appletalk zone would disappear (for a few minutes) and then appear again. In all, the time of n/w disruption was small – no more than 15 minutes but critical all the same. Also, it seemed to happen mostly in the evenings – around 7pm when there’s a lot of n/w activity.
On the winnt server, which serves as the seed router, I noticed in the event viewer several warning messages all with the eventID 48 of a packet received on adapter ” that contained errors & is not being accepted.
When I tried to stop the appletalk in devices, I got the error message 1286. I invariably ended up disabling the service, restarting the server, and then starting appletalk – automatic clicked in startup – and finally restarting the server.
(what a burden!!)
After I did that, for a day, there were no complaints but the very next day, the same problem re-surfaced.
Checking in the event viewer, again, showed another eventid message, this time an error, eventid 26 that “an invalid AARPpacket was received on adapter..”
I do hope I have been explicit.
All ideas and suggestions would be appreciated.
You guys gotta help, before I lose all me hair!!!