CAT-5 is rated to 100M CAT-5e is rated to 350M CAT-6 and CAT6e is rated to 550M or 1000M depending on your source CAT-7 is supposedly rated to 700M or presumably 1000M Just an FYI though, experience suggests you don't want to exceed say 80 m .. beyond that, and you can get attenuation and signal degradation. Especially if there is EMI around.
I was thinking the same thing earlier before I got side tracked at work. Does sounds fishy, could be a route issue / config in the fw etc..
Can you add the DNS server to the DMZ of the router so it is not affected buy the router firewall at all? Just the clients would be.
Ok so I still need help... I've done several tests using tracert and pathping... Nothing is really conclusive... The loss of packets only occurs like once out of ever 10 or 12 times. So it's hard to tell when I switch out cables whether or not they made a difference. My conclusion was it wasn't... I think what worries me most is that the connections on the workstations seem fine when it's just me trying them. I can stream video and access files on the server no problem. It's when the 25 staff are all on at once that it seems to not be able to handle it. That seems like we need to upgrade something to allot more bandwidth?
Oh well thats your problem right there then just too many users on your network moving data around. The max theoretical data throughput you can have is 12.5MB/s (on a 100mb ethernet). Now the firewall will bring that down, Im sure the media converters will bring it down, and the fact that it has to go up the path, down the path, up the path, and out is causing extra traffic taking up data as well. Your probably looking at anywhere between 6-9MB/s of actual throughput that you are throwing 25 users on accessing files, loading web pages that are becoming larger every year, and possibly streaming a video too? How do you think that is going to all work with only a few MB per second of bandwidth? Having to travel through the firewall twice for every transaction done is definitely not helping things. Firewalls generally are the biggest limits on bandwidth throughput.
Man I wish I would have found this thread sooner. This is right up my ally. I specialize is routers in switches because that is what I do for a living(tier 1 ISP). Okay lets go down the line. I checked the specs in the media converters and they are just fine for the job. To answer your question about why the first ping is always taking longer is because of a little protocol called ARP(Address Resolution Protocol) that is used to map your layer 3 IP address with a MAC address. This is normal and is nothing to worry about. When you changed all the clients to full/100 did you do the same thing at the switch port as well? When you set something to full/100 you disable auto negotiation for speed and duplex. If you do not do the same on the other end base100 ethernet specs say that is auto negotiation failed to drop to speed 10/half duplex. As you can imagine this is very bad because the switch starts to think there are collisions when there are not. Do you have switches connected to switches? If so STP could be causing some network inefficiencies as well. I have not worked with that switch before so I'm not really sure what it is capable. Frankly I wish you had a more power switch running cisco IOS because there is so much more information you could get and tweaks that could be made. Have you employed any VLANs? When are you normally in TS? I'm sure I could help you hash this out.
So Q , you hit the nail on the head in our discussion in Team Speak. That firewall was severerly crippling our network speed. I threw a switch in front of it and it worked pretty well. I don't know how well but significantly. I wanted to know if you could provide me with a suggested firewall, incase our internet speed was being dampened by that firewall's throughput speed as well? I can provide you with any information you need. Much appreciation.
I'm glad to hear it worked for you. Unless your internet connection is faster than 150mb/s then I don't think you will have a problem continuing to use that same firewall. With the switch in front the only time you are using the fire wall is when the clients are trying to us the internet everything else should be flying through those switches at full speed without hitting that shared 150mb/s cap.