Networking — troubleshooting procedures

Industrial Ethernet, cabling, network segmentation, and diagnostics for shop-floor networks. Browse by topic.

5 published procedures.

• Wireless on the Plant Floor: Diagnosing Dropouts, Roaming Failures and Interference

  A machine that "lost WiFi" has failed in one of three different ways — interference, a coverage hole, or a roam that outlasted the control protocol's watchdog. This procedure separates them with numbers you can read off the client radio in ten minutes, then fixes each one, and is honest about the traffic that should never leave copper.

• Capturing and Reading Industrial Traffic Without Stopping the Line

  A switch will not show your laptop other devices' traffic — that is what a switch is for. Read the port counters first, then set up a mirror session or a TAP without knocking a device off the network.

• Segmenting a Plant Network Without Dropping the I/O

  A flat factory network works until the day it doesn't — then a broadcast storm, a worm, or a mystery dropout takes the whole site down at once. Here is how to tell those three failures apart on a running line, where the Purdue levels actually get cut, why a controller and its I/O must stay together, and how to migrate an existing flat network cell by cell without stopping production more than once.

• Network Loop & Broadcast Storm — Line Down

  You will be able to tell a broadcast storm apart from a dead device or a multicast problem in under two minutes, find the physical loop from the switch instead of by pulling cables, and configure RSTP, ring redundancy, and storm control so it cannot happen again.

• Intermittent Ethernet Dropouts — Prove It's the Physical Layer

  You'll be able to tell a duplex mismatch from a damaged cable from VFD noise using switch port error counters alone, then fix the one you actually have — without swapping hardware you don't need to swap.