True Network Story

Issues

Wireless sessions on Teams at one location routinely reconnected and had sessions dropping.  The same behavior was also observed with clients on the wired network but with less frequency.  Also, more critical SAP sessions hosted overseas were dropping at the same site.  This problem went on for weeks affecting executives and normal users.

Actions

Quickly we ruled out wireless as a root cause because some wired clients experienced the same issues.

The problem was not hard to reproduce so we took WireShark packet captures on a client machine and saw requests timing out for traffic to the Teams hosted servers in the cloud.  No surprises there but nothing pointed to the root cause.

Next, we set up monitoring to span the port on the switch connected directly to the SD-WAN and took more Wireshark packet captures.  We could see traffic from the SD-WAN that was flooding the production network with ARP requests.  Once the flooding filled the buffers on the switch those packets were dropped.

The connection to the SD-WAN was direct between the production switch and the SD-WAN customer premise equipment meaning both were on the same network.  To prevent the ARP flooding, we changed the network to a 2-host /30 network number so that segment separated the SD-WAN network from the internal network of our client.

ARP flooding stopped, and life was good.

Reflection

This fix was implemented after only a few hours of troubleshooting.  However, our client had struggled with the issue for over two weeks and was not able to separate wireless as part of the problem.

Don’t wait until your executives pressure IT to get your network issues resolved.

Network Service Professionals know how to hit the ground running in the most complex networks.  Our engineers can achieve within hours what normally takes days to accomplish.

Contact Network Service Professionals today.  You won’t be sorry.