What are some reasonable tests to assure ourselves that all the ports on a 24-port hub are working correctly? We have some Linksys EF2H24 ver 2 EtherFast® 10/100 24-port Auto-Sensing Hub that may have had some ports damaged in a lightning strike. I'm wanting to confirm that all ports are operational.
Note: I'm taking the hubs out of service to perform the testing, so my main concerns are:
- Having adequate test coverage
- Minimizing the time it takes me to perform the tests
Actual Photo of EF2H24 ver 2 hub in service
Stock Photo of EF2H24 ver 2
It's a hub? I'd just use ping. Take two laptops or a desktop and a laptop, put them in the same subnet, and move the laptop from port to port. Ping with various packets sizes, and check the results.
This will work for switch ports as well.
In my experience, damage from lightning does not cause subtle performance degradation. Usually the port will be dead, or not. In which case check for a link light (or link status) is sufficient.
How about plugging a laptop in to each successive port and checking for connectivity?
Option A: Check hardware status with a network RJ45 tester.
Option B: Plug non production devices (desktops, servers, laptops, etc) and simulate real trafic (that is, MS broadcasts, http downloads, ICMP, UDP, etc) and search for errors, there are software tools like mtr-tiny, iperf, etc to test ip to ip traffic and packet loss.
Option C: use option A and option B.
:)