Packet retransmits and bad check sum on ethereal capture

I work in a hospital and we are deploying a new radiology technology that will allow the doctors and xray techs to view xray, catscan, mri, and ultra sound images digitaly instead of using the old xray films that most of us have seen. Here is my problem. All the workstations that are in the radiology wing of the hospital are somewhere in the neighborhood of 220-270ft of ceiling tile away from the closest switch.

When images are attempted to be viewed over the network there is a delay in viewing them on the workstations in the the radiology dept. I captured a bunch of data using ethereal and there was a significant amount of rebroadcast traffic as well as bad checksums in the capture.

Light duty traffic such as web browser and light application work fine. I am thinking the reason is because of the long runs in the cable plant.

The switch is a 24 port cisco 3550 running 100MB full on all ports with about half of them open.

Output of sho proc shows the switch might as well be sleeping. It is idle. Memory utilization on the switch is also low.

Am I on the right path here? Any suggestions on how to fix it?

Thank you for all your help in advance.

Steve Johnson Brooks Memorial Hospital snipped-for-privacy@brookshospital.org

Reply to
Newbie72
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What type of cabling is used CAT 5?

If so try one test run of CAT 6 cabling with the same length of cabling to see if problem is migitated

In a radiology department there may be lots of interference.

Reply to
Merv

It is all Cat 5/5e. I got a cable analyzer and the longest length tested on the analyzer to be 212M long. Our maintenance folks that run the cable seem to think those numbers are not accurate. thos tested it with a different fluke meter and it tested 340ft at the longest run.

Reply to
Newbie72

The spec for Cat5/Cat5E is 100 metres

Get another switch (10/100/1000) and place it as close as possible to the radiology dept and then run CAT 6 to the workstations

Reply to
Merv

After comparing the tests of the 2 analyzers I have determined the first analyzer we used tested distance to and from the closet and the longest run is actually around 340ft or 104.61..... meters. Some of the drops are actually within distance but still getting low link level readings on the analyzers with tcp retransmits and bad check sum packets galore on a packet sniff. I am going to test by isolating the runs and plugging the machines they use in radiology directly into the switch today.

Steve

Reply to
Newbie72

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