network card issues

[jjohnsoncantell]

Greetings,

 

Im running server 2k8rw with forefront 2010 as a firewall only. I have been having latency issues and as a test i tried to manually force the link speed on both the nics down to 100mb-fd as a test. As soon as i changed the link speed down the network card refused to work, no lights, nothing. I had already configured the switch port down to the same. Even after a reboot the network card stopped working as soon as server had loaded to the logon screen.

 

Any ideas would be helpful as to what may be causing this.

 

THanks

James

[CAWJames]

You have tested the switch port as well, by plugging in something else? I say this, not in a grandmother sucking eggs type way, but in a learnt the hard way type of thing! Switch with ports that were flaky when we loaded it.

 

Other than that, try newest drivers and newest firmware if available. Other than that, on-board NICs do fail sometimes, cheapest fix is sling a PCI NIC in there.

 

James

[SYNACK]

The other thing to test is TMG itself, will all the SPs, hotfixes and hacks applied we still had latcncy issues with certain sites and types of traffic that caused us to pull the device and use ISA2006 instead which actually works reasonably reliably.

[jjohnsoncantell]

thanks for your replies guys.

 

I dont think its the switch port because we have a filtering box between the switch and the router which can still be accessed. Our config is like this

 

core switch - filtering box - isa firewall - demarcation box - bt fibre switch.

 

The filtering box can still be accessed from internal network which would seem to rule out a switch issue. Checking the nics on the filtering box the internal nic is live and working but the external nic is showing as dead. Same as the internal/external nic on the isa box and the internal nic on the demarcation box. There was no problem when i set the link speed of both nics of the filter box to 100mbfdx, only occured when i manualy set the isa nics to that speed. The moment i did that the nics on the other devices stopped recieveing.

 

James