Lenovo Nic & Cisco Switch Major Issues

[brandon.rush]

Hey Everyone,

About two years ago my company put out a bunch of brand new Lenovos. I am not exactly sure of the model, I believe they were one of the thinkcenter M series. To cut to the chase, as soon as a few users connected to the network using the switches their nics completely stopped working. The computers would not connect anywhere else on the network after being disconnected the first time. The only way to get the computer to attempt to connect again was to re-image it. Even after re-imaging the computer it only connected for a few seconds before doing the same thing. The fix was to install additional network cards in each machine. We had to do this for over 100 machines. It was a Marvell card that was installed originally with the motherboard. Also note that if we took the computers home they would work fine on our home networks.

Now two years later, we have put out a bunch of M71z all in ones and it looks like we may run into the same issue. Just last week we had two of them that could not connect to the network. After taking them to our homes we were able to connect with no problem. These are using Realtek built in nics.

Just a quick overview of our network. We are running about 5 buildings with Cisco 6500 series switches as the backbones. Attached to those are a bunch of 100mb/s 3500, 3550 switches.

Has anyone ever dealt with an issue like this? We ha contacted Cisco, Lenovo, and the Nic card manufactures and no one has come up with a solution.

Any help is appreciated!

[Leo Laohoo]

Has anyone ever dealt with an issue like this?

Need more info than this.

When the wired NIC stopped working, what error messages do you see on the switches?

Did the switches go into error disable?

Have you tried to connect the PC/Laptops DIRECTLY to the switch?

Do you see the same issues with printers?

You said you have 3500XL and 3550 switches, is this correct?

Do you see the problems occuring MORE on the 3500XL or 3550 switches?

[brandon.rush]

No the switches did not go into error disable nor did I see any error messages on the switches.

I have tried to connect the PC directly to the switches and we get the same issues.

We have not had an issue yet with printers, they have been working with not glitches and we have over  50 of them.

I am not exactly sure if the issue happened more on either switch. I know for sure it was happening on both. Probably something I can test this week when in the office.

[Leo Laohoo]

Ok, so when the "ports don't work", what do you see?  Is the NIC cards' light (at the back) still ON and blinking?

On the switches, what output do you get when you run the command "sh interface "?

I need to determine where the problem occurs most because there is a known issue (the one I've experienced) with the 3500XL when connected to the latest generation of GigabitEthernet NIC cards by Intel.  When this happens the 3500XL ports would go down/up like <20 times per minute.

You may NOT get the same error messages but that's a start.

[brandon.rush]

The light on the nic does not come on at all.  I will run the command tomorrow and let you know what the outcome is.

Also, I forgot to mention that the issue only occurs on Windows 7 computers. The same model computers running Windows XP do not experience the issue.

[Leo Laohoo]

Wow.  I've never heard or seen something like this before!

And all the NIC drivers are up-to-date?

Have you tried to reformat and re-install Windows 7 (not re-image)?  I want to know if there's an issue with the SOE.