Company network slow speeds

[madogk]

Hello,

I work at a golf course as a course marshall and also look after all the IT stuff. The network is SLOW! We have a router from our ISP and 4 switches from before the flood. I have basic understanding of networking. But on this scale I would like some help before spending the company money

From what I understand of networking I need to upgrade the router/switches

What I'm looking for:

• 
  x1 Gigabyte router
  x2 16 port Gigabyte Switch
  x1 08 port Gigabyte Switch

Our budget is small.

I wanted your help in choosing what to buy

MaDoGK

 

[boosted1g]

FYI it is gigabit for speed. a bit is a single 1 or 0 (so gigabit is 1 billion of them); a byte is a group of 8 bits which is enough bits to represent a character on a keyboard or many other things.
While most data transfers (like from hard drive) are measured in bytes per second, networking is measured in bits per second.

What is your current router?
Please elaborate what "slow" is (speed and doing what activity) and if this is with wireless or wired machines.
If your internet browsing is slow on wired devices then that is more likely an ISP issue then your networking equipment.
Now if networking between local computers is slow that could be a different story.

Also you never mentioned what level of wireless you need or if none at all.

 

[madogk]

Its the LAN speed, wired. Speed between server and workstations, workstation and workstation. We have 8 PCs (incluiding server), 4 IP cameras, fingerprint access control system (with 4 readers). Wireless is important but not to connect to the LAN, just for visitors to check there emails & IM. We already have 2 APs from TPLink for that purpose, didn't think that was a major issue for LAN speeds. We notice the slow speeds on the IP cameras, SLOW, passing files over network, SLOW, and connection to the reservation programs database, SLOW. Maybe theres just to many things over the same network.

Internet speed isn't awesome but we should be getting fiber optic in a few months so that should help 😛

Anything else I forgot to say?

 

[gerr]

Check your switches for loops, ie multiple connections between them. If they are not running spanning-tree or some other loop prevention, they might be flooded with loops which would take most of their CPU utilization, thus making them slow.

 

[madogk]

Check your switches for loops, ie multiple connections between them. If they are not running spanning-tree or some other loop prevention, they might be flooded with loops which would take most of their CPU utilization, thus making them slow.

This is going a little over my head but how could I tell if there was looping with my switches. I suppose they would have to be managed switches or have STP (?)

I've been looking at Wireshark & I get various errors:
TCP: New fragment overlaps old data (retransmission?)
SSL: Malformed Packet (Exception occurred)
And errors:
TCP: Connection reset (RST)
TCP: Previous segment not captured (common at capture start)
TCP: This frame is a (suspected) out-of-order segment
TCP: ACKed segment that wasn't captured (common at capture start)

Like I say this is way over my head...

 

[bygrob]

Did anyone ever help you out?

 

[madogk]

Did anyone ever help you out?

Not really 😛 I think we'll probably just upgrade the whole network as soon as they get around to bringing the fiber optic close enough to connect