FSILG - Problems with ethernet ports

Is the wireless network working?

The wireless network is run and maintained by MIT IS&T. If the wireless network is working, that means that your house has a connection to the MIT network and to the internet. This means that your house router is working appropriately.

If neither your wireless or your wired network is working, see the article about troubleshooting your house's network connection: [Network outage troubleshooting for FSILG network contacts]

Wired network ports

The wired network ports in your house are owned an maintained by the house. All of your ethernet ports should be setup to run on one of the switches that your house owns. These are usually Netgear switches (dark blue devices with either 24 or 48 ports).

Usually, when a wired network port is not working, it's linked to one of four problems:

• Your computer's ethernet port is malfunctioning
  This is easy to test. Simply take your computer and connect it to a network drop that you know is working
• The ethernet cable between your computer and the wall is broken
  Connect a different cable to see if that fixes the problem
• The wiring between the network switches and your wall jack are malfunctioning
  Test your computer in another network port and test another computer in your network port
• The switch that your computer connects to is malfunctioning
  This can affect one computer if only one port on the switch is broken or can affect multiple computers if one or more switches is down

Testing your internal (Netgear) switches

The most common reason for problems is that the switches do not have power

The easiest way to test the switches is to take a laptop and ethernet cable to the network switch and find your internal switches.

1. Make sure they have power and are turned on
2. Check what happens when you connect a computer directly to one of the ports on each of the Netgear devices.
3. If it works in one switch, try the others