Know your network, know your tool

Things are tough when you need to troubleshoot your tool.

I was getting ready to setup my Profishark IOTA inline capture device (https://www.profitap.com/iota/) on a link. This shouldn’t cause an issue since I’ve done it countless times. Famous last words always start with ‘should’.

I powered the unit up, logged into it and connected it inline and no packets were traversing the unit. I double checked and everything was connected properly. Hmmmm.

I removed the IOTA and checked the 2 switch ports and noticed that even though they were 1 Gig ports, the speed reported was 100 Mbps. First I saw it in my Optiview XG switch report, then I confirmed it by manually checking both ports.

I’ve seen cabling issues (length termination, noise. etc) and interfaces do this in the past, so I tried changing the IOTA ethernet port to 100 Mbps and everything worked.

Good to know, and the next thing I did was equally as important… I put a posit note on the IOTA stating that the Ethernet port was manually configured for 100 Mb for future reference.