Exactly what it says on the tin
Every now and again, one of the buildings in my college (small college, one router in the main building, switches elsewhere with various media converters/laser links etc) will disconnect from the rest of the college for hours/minutes. It then goes back up for mins/hours, and repeats.
At first, I assumed that the building was disconnecting completely - during an episode I can ping computers in the same building, but not ones on the main college site. However, running a port capture recently showed me that the various broadcasts from the main site
are reaching this building - but it seems packets are not going the other way.
The same hardware has been working absolutely fine for some time - the problem started this year; our computer officer is blaming a combination of WinXP and DHCP (why DHCP I completely fail to understand).
Does anyone have any ideas? I'll happily provide further info if I can... I have two 2 minute port captures, one from a period when it was working, and one when it wasn't...
Thanks!