Chattering NIC?

G

greenfreak

New Member
I have a computer that I got back that someone said had a faulty NIC that was sending out packets all over the place; I've always called that a chattering NIC.

Now, I know of the phenomenon but have never seen it myself. The NIC is integrated into the system board so if there is a problem, I'll have to prove it to Dell to get them to replace it.

I'm just not so sure what utility I could use from a DOS prompt to find out if this is true or not. I'm not in networking so I can't do anything server side... Any suggestions?
 
tommyj27

tommyj27

Not really Banned
will a sniffer pick up the crap it's spewing? you could try using ethereal or another sniffer on a connected system to listen for runts or whatever it's spewing.
 
octal

octal

New Member
Justintime said:
You checked the status and termination of your CAT 5?
Click to expand...

It would be something for him to look into, however unlikely that this is a problem if he already knows that there is random traffic going out on his network. If he used ethereal he should at least be able to pick up Ethernet frames, although they are probably garbled garbage.
 
octal

octal

New Member
octal said:
Justintime said:
You checked the status and termination of your CAT 5?
Click to expand...

It would be something for him to look into, however unlikely that this is a problem if he already knows that there is random traffic going out on his network. If he used ethereal he should at least be able to pick up Ethernet frames, although they are probably garbled garbage.
Click to expand...

...er...she?
 
rrfield

rrfield

New Member
ok, figure out the IP address (at a command prompt, ipconfig)
then, while you think the NIC is "chattering", go to a computer that is in the same broadcast domain, go to the command prompt, and type "netstat -a". Look for the IP address of the faulty NIC, see if there's lots of crap from it.

Most likely, the bad NIC is sending out tons of broadcasts. If the network is 192.168.1.0, subnet mask 255.255.255.0, it is sending messages to 192.168.1.255 (every host on the subnet).

I've seen it happen plenty of times, it can be pretty annoying until you find the bad NIC.

rrfield
 
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