Subnets and Network Browsing?

photozz asks: "We are on a large network (1000+ nodes) with a mix of everything, Wintel, Unix, Linux and Mac. Lately, we have been getting broadcast storms that kill the network. Our solution is to subnet everything with routers, thus killing broadcast trafic. BUT, this will limit Windows browsing on the network to each segment. Installing Brouters will just give us the same packet storm problems we had before. How can we stop broadcast trafic while enabling Netbios resolution acros routers?"

Comments

Troubleshooting technique

[adjuster]

Have you used a sniffer to see what this "broadcast storm" traffic is? That would do for a good start. A description of the issue other than "kill the network" would do more good as well. What kind of byte/sec and packet/sec counts are we seeing on the media?

Assuming it is broadcast related: Your 'doze boxes need to be using "H-Node" name resolution for their cruddy NetBIOS name resolution. You need WINS servers. You need to disuse protocols that are broadcast intensive.

To the guys that are saying "install a switch"-- apparently there's an understanding issue w/ regard to what a switch does. A layer-2 switch won't help a bit in this case-- just like the poster said (referring to bridging routers). An analysis of what the traffic on the wire is would be a great first step. Then, intelligent decisions can be made to address the problem. Layer-3 switching might be a potential solution, depending on what the traffic is.

Unless you're using layer-3 entities inside of switches, your router based solution is going to do more than mess up NetBIOS name service-- it'll slow everything down to a crawl. Most low-end routers don't even come close to wire-speed.

I had a customer swearing to me that they were having "broadcast storms" because they were getting massive numbers of collisions on a shared-media LAN. We took a look at it w/ a sniffer and discovered that broadcasts played no part in it. They were doing large file transfers to a machine that was dual-homed on the same physical NIC, and the machine was thrashing packets on and off the wire, "routing" the packets to two hosts that were in different subnets, but on the same media. Duh.

Don't assume you know what your problem is unless you know what your problem is...