Monitored and studied network to isolate and eliminate performance hindering problems. First, an extra DHCP server had been installed unintentionally and the service was shut down. The actual DHCP server was then found to be issuing old DNS information and causing an extreme lag when DNS always had to be routed to the secondary Google servers. The DNS information was updated to reflect the new DCs on the intranet.
This caused systems to be much more responsive, but brought to light a new problem. The whole intranet had become an island where time was not being properly read from NTP servers. Noticed by a client when her computer and cell phone clocks did not match, the intranet was about 5 minutes slow. The problem ended up residing in the firewall, which maintained an NTP service with incorrectly configured time. Whats more is that the firewall also redirected externally addressed NTP traffic to itself, causing everything inside the network to get its time. Once time was updated on the firewall, the intranet began keeping in time with external sources.

 

Project Student: Blake Kindred

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