Gateway is down.

My default LAN gateway has been down since Sunday, apparently (no emails have been coming in since that day, so...). I thought it went down Monday.

I couldn't fix it on Monday, because I had to work on Board Meeting reports all day... erroneous billing from 4R, delays on the TB spreadsheet by MCAJr, etc.

Tuesday (2 days downtime): I started to observe what the problem is. I noticed that upon bootup, the computer is quick until it hits the initialization of eth1. So I thought, it might be a dead LAN card. So I replaced it with a similar model (Davicom Cnet Pro200). To no avail. Still snail-paced from that point I mentioned, and for ever until it is forcefully shut down (unplugged).

I tried 4 LAN cards in different combinations, no improvement whatsoever.

So I tried my work PC. I transferred the hard disk of the gateway to it, but I still couldn't access it. I kept getting tx timeouts. So I thought the Cnet LAN cards weren't compatible with the dual-core CPU... but I couldn't pursue this line...

I decided to install Endian Firewall Community 2.2 RC2 (latest available)... but I still couldn't access the PC thru the network! WTH???!! This was when I noticed that the Fortigate which was functioning as the switch for the gateway was very hot. Looks like it needs to get a dose of compressed air... I also noticed that the activity LED lights went off whenever I manipulate the gateway's UTP cable/plug, so I tried another LAN cable. Voila! I could access the gateway thru the network now, ALBEIT intermittently. I think it was due to the overheated Fortigate. :-(

I hoped it was only the LAN cable which was causing the problem, but when I tried to re-attach the old gateway PC to the network, it was still going like a snail when it hit the eth1 init. Sigh...

Perhaps I'll just go with EFW 2.2 RC2 tomorrow... after all, they say it already has a DNS server, which was the only thing lacking in the old version, and this prevented me from using it on the gateway...

I'm crossing my fingers...