Testing Wires on Lan

Im looking for an inexpensive solution to test lan wires on a
network.

I have a large building with various network glitches. eg. cant
access
router web pages, computers cant find any users in the active
directory but can log on, sometimes they loose IP's, people cant log
on with wifi in some locations. I have tried may things but these
problems seem to persist. I wondering (its an older install) if the
problem could be poorly layed cable. Or bad cable or maybe even wrong
cable I really dont know.


Anyway Im hoping that there is an inexpensive solution to testing
this. Sure I have one of those idiot light network testing things. You
know the lights turn on 12345678, but other than the light being out
it tells you nothing. I'm wondering if there is something that is
simple (I'm not a network guru, but can follow instructions or if it
simple look at error messages) Perhaps you connect on one end of the
cable and then put a laptop on the other and use software to see if
there are problems or have test the wire and tell me if there are
problems. In one networking book I read, it actually talked about
something that could tell you how many feet away the problem was.
However that may be too expensive for us. We are a charity. And I also
don't want some thing that is so sophisticated that you would need to
be a network engineer to understand. I did download some software,
which the name has escaped me for the moment. But it really gave so
much information that I really could not make head nor tails of it
all. It probably was not the right tool.


Any Ideas what I could use?

"steve" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:819b496c-461d-41b1-8079-(E-Mail Removed)...
> Im looking for an inexpensive solution to test lan wires on a
> network.

There is no such thing.

All Testing tools all cost $$$$$$$$$

Even a cheap "do-very-little" Tools is several hundred dollars.

--
Phillip Windell
www.wandtv.com

The views expressed, are my own and not those of my employer, or Microsoft,
or anyone else associated with me, including my cats.
-----------------------------------------------------

Thanks. I have seen a variety of tools out there but. I was hoping
there would be some software say with two laptops that could be used.
But perhaps I dont undestand enough about the whole process to realize
that that just aint going to do it.

Thanks

Personally Steve I would advise you to concentrate on your Switch as the
source of the problem or a DHCP issue somewhere.

Maybe the Wireless Access Point you mentioned has DHCP enabled as well as
the server this can cause what you described.

Also what switch are you running, managed or un-managed; sometimes managed
switches require firmware upgrades to resolve intermittent faults etc...

Hopefully that might help you in some way...

Regards,

Kris


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kris Haynes IT [MCP], [MCTS], [MCITP] - www.krishaynes.co.uk
Living life as a Senior Systems Engineer Packet by Packet.

Many of our points are well taken, although I have tried to look at
all these issues. This is why I was hoping for a (perhaps lazy) mans
way of detecting this problem. Although I have spent much time on it
so it would not be lazy at this point. However one of your points is
particularly interesting, which I could expand upon. I could try to
disconnect things and make it bare bones and see if it works. If it
does then keep adding things to see if it stops working at some point.
Then I can narrow it down a little at least.

Thanks