Network Health Check (Data Comms)

Fluke LANMeter 638 with Switchwizard

The RSC can now offer a new LAN diagnostic and network health check service, with the acquisition of a FLUKE Enterprise LANMeter 683 with Switchwizard it’s possible for us to scan your campus network for potential problems. With the LANMeter’s Switchwizard option we can conveniently interrogate most vendor switches that support SNMP or RMON and examine detailed port performance.

With enhanced detection of VLAN traffic, such as Cisco's Inter-Switch Link (ISL) protocol, allows the Enterprise LANMeter to monitor individual backbone segments for bandwidth consumption and top talkers.

Information about detected VLAN traffic, and VLAN configurations on a per-port basis for the most popular switches are available.

The LANMeter can easily identify protocols that are commonly found on campus networks such as IP, IPX, AFP, NetBIOS & NetBEUI etc and monitor their impact on your infrastucture in real time. With 100Mbps RJ-45 Ethernet interfaces it's not the latest Fluke tool but is still a very advanced device of it's type.

Used In conjunction with Wireshark this tool can be a very powerful diagnostic & real time monitoring resource.

After appropriate induction the LANMeter can be loaned out to experienced college network engineers for up to a week at a time. However if you want to make an appointment the RSC Infrastructure Advisor can spend a day or so focusing on your network, generating a report from what is found and make recommendations which should either reassure you or put you back on a even keel. This is a pilot service and will only be made available to FE colleges & HEI's in the Scotland S&W region.

Cable Tester & TDR (SC8108)

If you have a requirement to diagnose UTP cable problems the RSC has a simple UTP Time Domain Refelctometer (TDR) that you can use.

This device is not a cable certifier but rather checks for correct pair mapping, RJ45 connections, and overall cable lengths. It will also tell you if there are any breaks in the cable and how far down the line the break is.

This TDR tool can be loaned to college network technicians for up to a week at a time. This is a pilot service and will only be made available to FE colleges & HEI's in the Scotland S&W region.

Please contact Mark Clark for further information;
m.clark@rsc-sw-scotland.ac.uk