Network General - Had major crash in the network

I suffered a major crash in my network last weekend.  What ever happened it borked my PWS Raspberry Pi setup.  That was when I discovered that the network, specifically the Verizon Quantum router, was no longer getting DHCP assigned IP numbers.  I did some tracing and found out that all of my TiVo equipment no longer had IP addresses.

When I went to troubleshoot the Quantum, I discovered that it no longer recognized the FIOS cable that was plugged into it.  I checked everywhere for potential hardware breakages that would explain it but it would come up for a few seconds and then disappear.  That is when I decided to take the Quantum out of the loop.  For one, it was no longer issuing IP addresses from its DHCP server and the TV cable thing.  I ordered a Motorola MOCA 2.0 adapter even though the TiVo Bolt was capable of setting up a MOCA network (I might still use this at a later date though).  The real problem was the fact that the TiVo equipment (Bolt and 2 Minis) were not responding at all and had taken on Bonjour addresses.  The Mini was able to communicate with the Bolt, but could not get back to the TiVo home page to receive updates.  It also appeared that this was causing some issues in using the TiVo equipment.

I then added a vlan behind my Cisco router and moved all of the TiVo equipment there.  When the MOCA adapter came in, I put it on the FIOS cable and connected it to the same vlan as the TiVo equipment.  I then saw that my TiVo equipment had IP addresses and could be updated from the TiVo site.

I determined that the weewx setup on my Raspberry Pi had failed.  It was causing kernel panics.  I then changed out the RPi hardware and setup a new weewx software build and got the PWS back online.

All of my traceback seemed to indicate that the Quantum had undergone a hard failure, no amount of reseting the Quantum seemed to revive it's capabilities.  So I made the decision to phase out the Quantum router.  I was able to get to the outside through the Quantum, but only because my Cisco Router has a manually assigned IP address in the Quantum LAN subnet.  I did some research and it seems that it is a fairly simple matter to take down the Quantum and bring up the Cisco in its place.

Will report back when I get this working.

Switch Install Failure

As I said in the previous post, I took the time to install the TP-Link SG2424 24-port managed switch under the Verizon Quantum Gateway and setup a pass-through vlan so that I could check to see if the switch was going to work in the network.  I should have tried out some other things as well.

It turns out that the SG2424 and the Quantum don't like each other.  When I set up the SG2424 with the same settings as the GS108T, moved over the Ethernet lines and attempted to get everything running, the problems began.  Problem One: the SG2424 would not keep all of its settings between reboots.  I kept having to reset the IP address of the switch even though I made sure that I hit the confirm button.  It just would not keep the new IP address and kept reverting back to the initial IP address which conflicted with other elements in my network.  Problem Two: the SG2424 seemed to not like pass-throughs where the I came from a different switch (the GS1-08Ts) through the SG2424 to the Quantum Gateway.  Problem Three: it would take sometimes 5 to 10 minutes before the Ethernet activity would settle down between the SG2424 and the Quantum.  It appeared that the SG2424 kept resetting itself multiple times.  Problem Four: After multiple resets, the traffic for my media equipment which flowed through the SG2424 to the Quantum would refuse to come up.

I took the SG2424 back to Micro Center where I bought it.  I will review the Netgear GS724 and other switches like it to see if I can use it to replace the one GS108T.  Very frustrating!