machin05

Hi all, My time here at King Edward VI Lordswood School for Girls is coming to an end and we are now looking for a new Digital Technology Manager. There's fairly quick turn around on this, with interviews taking place next Thursday (24th October) All details can be found on our site here - https://lsg.kevibham.org/vacancies/support-staff-vacancies/ Please share with anyone you know who might be interested. Cheers

We found our SA password in a plain text SQL command in Task Scheduler (it was a task for archiving attendance results). Might be worth digging around?

Problem seems to be resolved now - Smoothwall support connected remotely and, in their words, they "...updated the NIC from the backend" Not entirely sure what that means, but we did lose connection for a minute or 2 with lots of proxy authentication errors. However, since then it's been rock solid so, touch wood, the problem has been solved. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to respond and offer their advice - it's much appreciated!

Yeah, not a bad shout. Not to tempt fate, but Smoothwall have been on our box remotely - I'm not sure what they've actually done, but I suspect they've restarted the NIC as everyone lost connection briefly and the proxy authentication popped up on everyone's screen. Looking at the logs there is a NIC Link Up message but no NIC Link Down one prior to it! Anyway, since then I've not had a dropout, although Smoothwall themselves have escalated it to 2nd line. Only other significant change I've made is to put a bandwidth limit on everyone's connection so no one can connect at more then 15mbps.

Yep, it's got a J number. It's HP branded but old 3COM tech, I believe.

Yes, I did that fairly early on in my troubleshooting. It helped in as much as it brought the port back online a lot quicker, but didn't prevent it dropping in the first place.

Having real difficulty in finding any firmware updates for our switch. It's fairly old - HP A5500-48G EI

....and first drop out of the day 10 minutes into the first lesson

This is very interesting. Our current box is a config migration from an old box. We're using NIC1 for VLAN1 (the one that keeps dropping) and NIC3 for guest and BYOD VLANs (no dropouts on this NIC). All the chipsets look the same on the GUI though. Which NIC would be the management NIC?

Official hardware. It's an S8 appliance. As an aside, changing the port on the core switch hasn't changed anything. Same issues, different port number. Incidentally, there were no dropouts at all over lunch, but there's been about 3 or 4 already during the last lesson. Could it be traffic related?

Do you mean change the duplex mode on the Smoothwall box itself, or on the switch config?

Cheers for the reply - just to avoid confusion, the DUPLEX issue isn't on the same port as the Smoothwall, I only mentioned it as it's the only other recurring message I'm getting from the core switch syslog.

Unsure if this is related either, but having looked through the syslogs on the core, I'm getting a recurring issue with port 3: %%10LLDP/5/LLDP_DUPLEX_INCONSISTENT(l): The mode of duplex mismatch discovered on GigabitEthernet1/0/3 (Full-duplex), with D�[�� (Unknown-duplex). It's another switch that's connected to port 3, however that switch isn't reporting any duplex errors in its syslog.

Hi all, Real head scratcher this morning that I'm hoping someone can help me with! The port on our core switch (HP A5500) that our Smoothwall box is connected to keeps going up and down. It will drop for 3 seconds then come back up but this can have prolonged impact on users internet connectivity as it takes a minute for the IP of the Smoothwall to respond again resulting in proxy authentication errors in the browser etc. Must have happened around 15 times so far today. It is something we've seen very sporadically before (once a fortnight and never more than twice in a day) so I've never been able to get to the bottom of it. I believe it started after we enabled STP (RSTP) and loopback protection across all our switches. However, there's nothing in the logs to suggest it's the loopback protection that is disabling the port. The messages in Smoothwall look like this: 09:10:07 Kernel [6166017.202045] e1000e 0000:01:00.0 ethA: NIC Link is Down 09:10:10 Kernel [6166020.380084] e1000e 0000:01:00.0 ethA: NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: None The logs from the switch look like this: 04/01/2023 11:18:23 IP REDACTED %%10IFNET/3/LINK_UPDOWN(l): GigabitEthernet1/0/36 link status is UP. 04/01/2023 11:18:20 IP REDACTED %%10IFNET/3/LINK_UPDOWN(l): GigabitEthernet1/0/36 link status is DOWN. I have disabled STP on the port that the Smoothwall is connected to (port 36) but that hasn't prevented it from randomly going down. It has, however, increased the speed at which the Smoothwall IP comes back online after the status is back up though (doesn't really solve the issue, but prevents users from experiencing as many connectivity issues). There doesn't seem to be a pattern to when it drops out. Traffic on the Smoothwall isn't particularly high so I' pretty sure it's not a bandwidth issue. We did have our lease line upgraded from 100mb to 1Gb over the Christmas holiday, so that might be a factor, however no configuration changes on the core switch were needed, and as I said, we did have this issue before, albeit a lot less frequently. Today is the first day back for all the students. We had a staff INSET yesterday and there were a couple of dropouts then too. Currently I'm at a bit of a loss as to where to begin troubleshooting now! I am going to configure another port with the correct VLANs on the core switch and change the connection to that port to rule that out first of all. Aside from that, maybe changing the physical network cables? Is it worth disabling STP on the core for troubleshooting purposes? Any expertise would be greatly appreciated as I'm really flummoxed here - genuinely don't even know if it's Smoothwall, the switch itself, or physical connectivity causing the dropouts! Cheers, Will

Unfortunately, this still isn't working, but I'm now wondering if additional ports need to be opened on our firewall (we don't use Smoothwall as our firewall, we have a managed service for our firewall provided by our ISP). Do you know which ports they would be? 25, 465 and 587? Many thanks.