Hi all,
I've got some kind of problematic issue.
We're having some systems running in a process network at customer site. These systems exchange data using TCP/IP. One part of the system is a computer running windows which receives data from custom-built boxes via ethernet. The problem is that the data transfer from the boxes to the PC stopped a few times at different customer sites. The problem is not reproducible and we don't know wether the boxes dropped the connection or the PC, if it was at the TCP/IP layer or the ethernet layer or something.
The system components are connected via a switch, so ppl think that it would be nice to replace the current switch with one that has logging capabilities. Are there any switches out there that are able to report wether an error occured at the physical layer or the transport layer and give us enough information to debug the problem? I'm thinking of something like a tcpdump output, but I thought that this would add too much load to the switch, as it has to run all the time coz we dunno when the error will happen again... So the switch needs enough space to store the log for, say a few months. Would SNMP help for this purpose? Also note that we cannot run a packet sniffer on the windows PC.
Any help, ideas and thoughts would be appreciated.
thxalot
.alx