Monday started with a bang this week. We were having lots of problems with network connections dropping randomly throughout the building.. In the middle of trouble shooting this, a third of the network just disappeared. The first place to look when this happens is always the wiring cabinet. I took a quick look there and didn’t see anything out of the "ordinary". It was on my second trip to the wiring cabinet that I noticed that one of our 48 port switches was not blinking; all the lights were on and nobody was home. I went over to the server room to check the main switch that acts as the backbone for the network and it was showing no connection back to the other switch. I tried resetting the switch and still nothing. I then tried a factory reset of the switch and it never came back on. Guess what we didn’t have a spare of; a switch. It is amazing how many small routers you can find lying around in a company since that is what I had to use to get things back up and running. I did get a new switch shipped in overnight and it was installed Thursday morning. We were already looking to do some major infrastructure upgrades next year, so we just started the project a little early. The new switch was a Netgear ProSafe 48-port Gigabit L3 Managed Stackable Switch. There has been a noticeable improvement in throughput on the network. We put this router in the server room were most of the bandwidth was needed.