interesting problem today

[bailey]

my brother - law started switching the breakers off and on today to locate the power feed in one of the rooms in the house as he was doing some remodeling ( building a new second bathroom ) .

doing so when there was several computers on in varies room in the house on a big home lan.

system is a wireless wide-band modem connected to a linksys wireless router which in turn feeds two more linksys switched in the upstairs, so all the computers that was online were turned off and back on very quickly including all the other hardware in the lan system.
after which none of the computers no longer had any connectivity at all but the lan did show limited or no connectivity.
I proceeded to power down all the computers , modem and router then restart everything one at a time, and still nothing, called the provider and they were able to ping the modem so that part was working and the problem had to be in the network in the house,
I spent several hours trying to get just one computer to connect to the Internet and no luck.

just for the fun of it I powered down the linksys 5 port switch in my bedroom and then reset everything again and everything worked just fine.

what gave me a clue to try that was xp came up with a error on the connection of a ip conflict on the network.

bottom line is that the switch much have remembered the ip address of my computer and was causing the conflict on the network.

it was starting to make me scratch my hair out.

[mbossman2]

Not sure that's the cause as regular (non-L3) switches function purely on MAC addresses of the devices attached. A switch may be assigned an IP address by the network but that is for network and remote management purposes.

The CAM (Content Addressable Memory) table stores the physical port number and the MAC address attached to it and all switching decisions are based upon that information.