From: "Geo." 

"Ellen K"  wrote in message
news:10972d.c6b736{at}harborwebs.com...

> dropped packets), the problem can still only appear when there's a lot of
> traffic on the network?   Like, the switch freaks out when it gets too busy
or
> something?    Do switches have fans?  Could it be that it
gets too hot?

Some switches have fans, some don't. Basically what a switch does is it
sees what machines are connected to what ports and it builds a sort of
routing table, that way it doesn't have to echo traffic to all the ports
when 2 machines talk to each other. If something should make the switch
think that table is corrupt (like spoofing as a machine it thinks is on
another port) the switch can get confused because it's trying to be smart
but situations can arise that shouldn't be possible. In a case like that
switch may do a soft reboot or just plain crash (heck it's only software).

> the laptops in a DMZ

It's also possible to put the servers in a more secure zone from everything
else, sometimes that's easier and can at least keep some important data
safer than it would otherwise be.

> Well, left foot, right foot I guess.

It takes patience, I've had intermittent problems that took me months to track down.

Geo.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5