How to troubleshoot wired network connection

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bozrdang

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I have a home network with an Airport Exteme wireless router connected to a Trendnet 5-port 1Gb switch. My Win7 pc is hard wired directly to the Airport Extreme and I have two media servers wired to the Trendnet switch. My problem is that when I try to play any 720p or higher media files over the netwrok on the Win7 pc, it stops and buffers every 10 seconds or so. I've tried VLC, WMP, and XBMC and they all behave similarly when trying to stream the media. Heck I've even had the occasional buffer playing mp3's through J. River Media Center while watching youtube videos. Everything is 1Gb and the connections show as such, but something seems amiss.

How do I begin to troubleshoot this issue?
 
bozrdang said:
I have a home network with an Airport Exteme wireless router connected to a Trendnet 5-port 1Gb switch. My Win7 pc is hard wired directly to the Airport Extreme and I have two media servers wired to the Trendnet switch. My problem is that when I try to play any 720p or higher media files over the netwrok on the Win7 pc, it stops and buffers every 10 seconds or so. I've tried VLC, WMP, and XBMC and they all behave similarly when trying to stream the media. Heck I've even had the occasional buffer playing mp3's through J. River Media Center while watching youtube videos. Everything is 1Gb and the connections show as such, but something seems amiss.

How do I begin to troubleshoot this issue?
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are you able to plug your 2 media servers into the air port extreme for some testing ?
 
throughput tests between the each media PC and the win 7 machine using crossover cables. Then retest with normal cables and add the airport unit.
 
Isolate them with the crossover cable idea.

Thereby bypassing any switching issues. If performance does not improve, then you have a NIC issue. If performance improves then you have a switch / router issue.
 
I connected one of the servers to the Airport Extreme along with my PC, and it still does the same thing. I don't have a cross over cable to test at this time. I'll have to pick one up, but because of work, I won't be able to get one until this weekend. I looked into iperf, but it needs to be installed on server and client. Both my servers run unRAID which is a custom Linux NAS OS. Not knowing much about Linux, I'm not sure how I would install it on the servers.

Are there any other suggestions?
 
If any of your computers have a gigabit network card in them (either discrete or onboard) then you don't need a crossover cable. Simply plug in a patch cable and the card will figure out whether it needs to be crossover or not.
 
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