“Do you have Gremlins in your network?” – IT Support Episode 33
Hi, this is Christian from “Northstar IT” and this week I want to talk about the gremlins in your computer network.
So we’ve recently taken on a new client and one of the problems they’ve been experiencing with the computer network for their business is a problem with the main company database. The feedback from the client or at the time the prospect, was that their incumbent IT guy had been finger-pointing.
The cause of the problem’s with the database, it’s the database company, you need to speak to them.
So they’ve called the database support people and they’ve said, “there’s nothing wrong with the database we’ve logged in, checked it all, the data’s intact. There’s something wrong with your computer network.”
So they go back to the incumbent computer guy and he says, “no, I’ve checked everything, there’s nothing wrong with it. Go back to the software company.”
And so for 18 months this has gone back and forth, back and forth…
So Northstar had been recommended to them and they asked for a meeting and the operation’s director asked me, “you’re an engineer by trade, what would you be doing to diagnose this problem?”
Well, I can tell you the first thing we would do a diagnostics test on your network switch. Basically, we install a little bit of software a little bit on the server and a little bit on a computer or even on two computers and it runs a little bit of call it – a tennis match between those two computers. It sends a tennis ball of data to the other end, it registers how long it takes to get there and how much of that data is still intact when it gets there and then it sends it back and repeats the test. And it goes on and on and on…
Then it produces this wonderful graph and analysis about how that network switch is performing. In the case of this prospect which they gave us the go ahead to do this test just to see how it would turn out, that network switch was running at 8.1% of normal speed and it was including over 29% of data loss, there was the cause of the problem.
So they gave us the green light to replace it.
So, if you’ve got gremlins in your computer network speak to your IT people, speak to the experts and make sure you get the right diagnostics run to generate the right results for you.
But before I wrap up, this is the last one before Christmas. Thank you for watching this year. It’s been quite a journey. Trust me I cringe when I watch the earlier episodes. Check out Youtube they’re all there, have a laugh at my expense and I’ll see you on the other side.
Merry Christmas!