Windows 7 LAN Party Troubles: Network Slowdown and Virus Infiltration Issues

[Firecracker]

Last night we had problems here at our lan party with slow network and viruses and other stuff. we found the person responsible for the viruses making other peoples anti-virus programs scan and pop up their thingys and he had porn and hacks so he had to be disconnected and cleaned up. now every thing is fine but we got a table cluster having problems we got this switch at the table cluster plugged into another one then goes strait to the core switch we have another three tables doing the same and no problems. I'am on a computer on the core switch which I'am at montoring the network traffic coming and going in and off the network. and the modem plug into this core switch. don't know why all the ports on the switch are blocking the other switch and everyone on it as a whole. all swiches are HP Procurves 24 and 48 ports.

 

[Trouble]

Firecracker:
Tough question. Has this particular switch exhibited any problems in the past. Is it new (factory default settings, no vlans)? I assume that you are using cat5 to cascade the switches, or are you using some type of stack cable to integrate the switch fabric? Managed switches use an algorithim called spanning tree to protect against loops and broadcast storms. It doesn't take more than one bad actor (NIC going bad, wonky wire) to create a problem. Have you tried just moving the problem switch to another table, just to see if the problem persists with a new position in the cascade. Sorry it's been a long time since I've actually had to troubleshoot any layer two issues. Wish I could be more help.

 

[Firecracker]

to make it easier to understand a Switch is plugged into the scond one (this one is causing the problems and blocking the users on the other switch and the switch it's self no matter what port is the first switch plugged into) this one goes to the core. (where we are monitoring, modem and servers are plugged into. we found out that virus throttling and software blocked the second switch as someone was or had virus worms from letting the first one connecting as this one didn't support the feature.