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I manage our shops network, and twice in the last year a single device has completely killed our network. When this happens you can't even access the router until you find/unplug the device and restart the router.
The first time ended up being a netgear access point that wasn't unplugged before the wireless started on the repeater (making a network loop).
The second time was when our network phones were updating firmware via our phone server and the phone server froze somehow causing one of the phones to be stuck in a download phase and another bricked. Somehow this brought our whole network down until I found and unplugged those phones affected.
My question is, is it normal for a network to be this easy to break, or is it sooner something with my network? Could you connect into any network and bring it down with a single device from the inside, or are there further measures that can be taken to prevent devices from easily crashing the router?
My network is an r7000 router running DDWRT, 12+ windows 7/8 computers, XBlue phone server with network phones, ip cameras, printers, 2 ubuntu bridges connecting other computers/cameras, phones, etc using IPV4
jAce
Posted 2014-08-26T15:21:41.843
Reputation: 1 222
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Good switches will detect and ignore network loops, packets storms etc. Check out the Spanning Tree Protocol for example.
– Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 – 2014-08-26T15:27:22.573This sounds like a bug within DD-WRT if this keeps happening with similar events. – Ramhound – 2014-08-26T15:36:11.000
I found an STP setting in DD-WRT. Is there any reason not to enable this since it's disabled by default? I'm unsure this would of prevented the phone issue I had? (not sure as I don't know a reason it took down the network besides what I mentioned) but it would seem in theory it should take care of network loops so thanks for the thoughts. – jAce – 2014-08-26T15:52:16.803