Okay this is driving me NUTS.
The server will sit with a Network Status of "Unplugged" for ages until it is rebooted. This seems to occur at random times (2am, 10pm, 8:30am, 3pm etc) it does once every 24-48 hours or so. Environment is a small business with 6 workstations and 1 large Sharp Printer.
- Win 2008 SBS 64bit
- There are no scheduled tasks that I can link to it.
- Dell Poweredge 2900 with Dual Broadcom BCM5708C NICs (Only one in use)
- Drivers are up to date per Dell's Site
- The Cables ARE plugged in.
- The Cable has been replaced twice.
- The entire switch this server is hooked up to has been replaced.
- The router has been replaced recently.
- For every instance I have noted it being down I can find no correlations in the event log.
- Have turned off Auto-Negotiate and tried several settings.
- The NIC that has never been used has been swapped into active duty (same IP and everything) as the other, the first one was then disabled.
- I do see some LAN RX errors listed in the router (about 3% they don't appear to originate from the server but I can't totally rule that out).
- I have installed Wireshark just now and have set it to capture and save off to a log file.
- Winsock and IP Resets, They do nothing.
Best Answer
Is power-managment disabled on the network card ?
In my experience 99 of 100 times erratic network loss is caused by Windows putting the NIC to sleep from which it never wakes up again.
Go to the connection in "Network and Sharing center". Open the properties. Then hit the configure button just under the driver of the adapter.
Disable everything related to power-management. It will be on its own tab or be an option in the advanced settings.
If you can't disable it the driver doesn't support it in the first place so it is not the cause of your problem. In that case I'm inclined to put it down on some vague interaction between the network card and the switch. Updating the NIC firmware and the drivers (if possible) might help in that case.