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old cable drops

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I am a desktop support analyst with no formal training. part of the area I support has several computers that are EXTREEMLY slow. I have brought this to the attention of the approprate staff a few times, they continue to blame it on the desktops... I knew it isn't the issue because they were dual processor machines with at least 2 g ram... but i went along... we have reciently replaced that lease with new machines that have i5 processors and 4 gig ram... win7... so the users have new machines now ... and Arch's excuse has grown old...I am determined to help these folks out. the switches going out of the data area have excelent stats, or simmilar to the other areas. this area is at the far end of the floor, I am fairly certain that something is just not wired correctly from the patch panel to the user. I just feel like it is bad cable, crossed wires when it was punched down, something like that. can I use wireshark to identify bad cable?

asked 06 Mar '12, 14:28

Butigli's gravatar image

Butigli
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One Answer:

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No, wireshark can not detect bad cabling, you neeed a cable tester/analyzer to test the cabling.

What you can see in Wireshark are the effects of bad cabling, packet loss. Even though you need to take into account that there can be multiple sources for packet loss.

One thing that you need to check first is whether the switchport and system have the same duplex setting. Set both sides on AUTO and check what they negotiate or set both on fixed. A mix between auto and fixed full duplex is always resulting in a mismatch and lousy performance.

answered 06 Mar '12, 14:43

SYN-bit's gravatar image

SYN-bit ♦♦
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