I posted some questions a while back about networking problems we 
were having running TCP/IP over frame relay to our remote sites, and 
how one site was running okay, but the second site had all kinds of 
problems, especially with sessions and spoolers dropping.  We had 
already verified the wiring, router config, hub, and replaced the 
NIC on the PC's.  We finally called in HP and had a network tech 
put a network analyser on the PC that was having the most trouble 
(its problem was that the session would disconnect seemingly at 
will, whether or not the PC was in use or inactive).

Well, the analyser showed normal IP/SMB traffic up to a certain 
point where the HP3000 sent a "keepalive" request to the PC and 
the PC failed to respond, whereupon the HP3000 decided the PC 
was not really there and so it disconnected the VT session.  The 
tech said "It looks like the PC went to sleep for a while and then 
woke up when we came in and tried to do something".  This really 
rang a bell for me because this particular PC was a Gateway, and 
I have had experiences before with Gateway power saving modes 
where it would go into a power saving shutdown and refuse to wake 
up.  So, we disabled the power saver via the CMOS setup and 
sure enough, our problem was solved.  It seems as though the 
Gateway power saver monitors the disk drive, etc. and will 
shut down components when they are used for a time.  In this 
case it was actually shutting down the NIC when it hadn't been 
used for a certain length of time.  We presume the session 
disconnect while in use was because the user was typing stuff in 
but not transmitting it to the HP3000, so the NIC was not in 
use and got shutdown.

Disabling the power saver "feature" on the other (non-Gateway) 
PC's appeared to fix them as well.

The other problem was a new 233 Mhz PC that would "lock up" 
when running an application that the older PC (that it 
replaced) would run just fine.  Not only that, but moving 
the new PC to another location got rid of the problem. 
This turned out to be a problem with the new PC's NIC. 
It was set up to autosense the speed of the network, and 
while we are running the LAN at 10 Mbs, the hub was capable 
of 100 Mbs (as was the NIC) and it evidently tried to run 
at 100 Mbs and failed.  Setting the NIC to run at 10 Mbs 
only fixed this problem.

So, here are a couple of network problems that turned out to 
be PC problems.


Jim Phillips                            Manager of Information Systems
Voice: (330) 527-2124                   Therm-O-Link, Inc.
  Fax: (330) 527-2123                   PO Box 285; 10513 Freedom St.
Email: [log in to unmask]       Garrettsville, Ohio  44231