[K12OSN] Network Error Troubles Again ...

[Jim Christiansen]

I know I'm shooting in the dark but my school needs some new ideas again :-)

My son is doing a Science Fair Project on clustered computers and has 
everything functioning just fine and looks like he may make it to the 
nationals with his angle using open mosix.

He wanted to run a series of seti jobs on one of my labs that is k12ltsp 
based but using a bunch of knoppix-cluster cds to come up with some really 
impressive numbers (and for the fun of it).

What he discovered was that of 14 network drops, only three consistently 
returned errors:0 dropped:0.  All of the others after running for only a 
minute or so were ifconfiging errors:25 dropped:150 or worse.  This is on 
the exact same machines that work steadily through every school day as 
k12ltsp clients w-i-t-h one or two random freeze-ups each day.

Our technician has been in the school recently and has added a couple new 
long runs to switches 300 feet away from the main gear in our network.  I 
don't think that a network tester was used to check the new runs...

Is it possible that these errors be caused by new but faulty distant network 
runs? Or, is this a problem that is more likely local to a bad switch the 
library boxes are hooked to?

Please feel free to bring out the crystal balls for this one!

Jim

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