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A question around responsibilities maintaining a large LAN (Ethernet).
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peteb2:
Love to have some light on this issue please. Situation: An IT department provides and acts as maintenance point-of-source for support on a reasonably large Local Area Network. Lots off servers, lots of clients ...switches, routers both cable & fibre etc.... a fairly big setup, typical of a Media Corporate.

Sharing bandwidth on this Network are a set of application specific servers and related client equipment which is entrusted to an engineering/electronics technician group whose duty it is to provide support to the folks that rely on this equipment to do their job. Any breakdown can result in large amounts of lost revenue.

Recently a pattern of breakdown began occurring. Lucky the backup system covered the sudden issue but soon it may not.  The usual fault finding included having log file records of events make by this specific system itself,  checked by the support dept of the company that originally supplied the application specific gear....

The diagnosis revealed what was possibly a sudden random loss of data at specific times so using the only available tools (WireShark) by the engineers, checks were made of just what was happening on the Network itself & pretty soon it could be seen a likely Packet loss/delay...

Now here's the quandary. Requesting assistance from the IT (Network system administrators) to provide proper technical tests of the LAN performance resulted in; "well xyx Pings ok so everything is ok".

My rant here as a maint-tech/engineer come benchie.... surely an IT Dept team endowed with the responsibility of managing a mission critical Network, would include a skill set of knowing exactly what is happening at the '1s & 0s' level of data transfer and for there to be some kind of actual TEST GEAR that is permanently or temporally connected 'listening' and monitors for packet loss, packet corruption, bit error rates or whatever needs to be done which would then indicate a good or randomly goofing Network?

I have no idea what IT folks do. Myself on the other hand, (a tech) surely they must be able to use some kind of test equipment that 'sniffs' any sort of LAN no matter how big right down to the raw signals of Ethernet to confirm that data is ALWAYS being passed with it being lost of corrupted by a switcher or bad RJ45 patching cable or at least that the Specifications (whatever they may be for Ethernet) are being adhered to?????

Clearly i need to go read up on 'Ethernet 101' but you can't tell me that "xyz Pings ok so the Network is 100% fine"  is a proper fault find when plainly something is wrong...

Looking forward to any input, (how do you do a proper technical analysis of Ethernet activity?) or am i thinking down the completely wrong path? TIA   :palm:

Someone:
IT is an enormous field, you're thinking of the narrower concept of a "network engineer" or similar. Trouble is the corporates/managers running that network might be either too small to have specialists, or have gotten by without them so don't see the need. Yes, there are a range of tools to test/diagnose these problems and some of them are embedded in those sorts of networks running full time to monitor and control issues.

Push it back up to your boss/management and ask for details of the network providers performance contract. (issue might be at your end where someone bought a link that isn't contracted to meet your needs for media streaming).
nctnico:
In my network maintaining days I'd just replace the RJ45 patch cables and bin the old ones. In 99.9% of the cases that fixed the problem.
JohnnyMalaria:
If the network is in a leased building, the IT department may not even have jurisdiction over the network infrastructure. Their responsibility may end at "well, it pings okay".

In my experience of working in a large corporation, "IT" means the computer on your desk, the software thereon and ensuring the security of the company's digital assets rather than the routers, cables etc.
vad:
Use some packet loss monitoring software to measure packet loss, latency and latency jitter between the affected hosts over time. Issues at physical layer (poor cabling, failing switch port, failing NIC port, etc) will show up on the report.
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