Network adapters are needed to connect to the network,
but what happens if they don't?
Let's talk to Wes at the bench, find out why.
Hey, Wes, good to see you.
Hey, good to see you too, Zach.
And we're both kinds of wearing gray on.
I know, I guess I got the memo.
We did, we must have got the same memo.
- Yeah, probably. - From the network?
Maybe, I see what you did there.
This leads me into my topic of the day,
is network adapters, configuration.
Network adapters, what I know of it is,
network adapters help us to connect to a network.
- That's right. - Is that right?
Yeah, basic functionality, sure.
So, other than the obvious answer,
which I’m sure you’ll give me anyway,
how do we know if there might be some issues with it?
So I want you to give me the obvious answer.
You can't connect to that network.
It is, it really is.
And joking aside, it's not always that easy.
Sometimes it really is that easy.
If a network adapter is failing,
you just don't have connectivity to the network,
but even saying the network adapters failing,
sometimes all isn't really so much the truth,
because you’re going to get intermittent issues
where maybe you notice when you stretch out
and you kick a wire maybe under your desk;
and in this context, we're really talking about wired connections.
Or maybe you move your desk chair,
your computer desk chair, you roll it back a certain way,
and then you see you lose connectivity.
So doesn't necessarily have to be
that all network connectivity is lost.
A lot of times it is, but sometimes you have those occasions
where you have what's known
as just intermittent network connectivity.
So intermittent, like fluctuating or fluttering,
or maybe is it slow to connect, that sort of thing?
It could be slow, absolutely, that could be one thing,
but it could be one of those things
where you're getting a connection
and maybe you notice on your desktop,
it says ‘Not Connected’.
- Or limited connection. - I've seen that.
Or it comes back and then it goes away for a few minutes.
And that’s a tell-tell sign, that's intermittent connectivity.
A lot of times we don't see that on wireless networks.
There are sometimes, again, can never say never,
a lot of times you see that in wireless networks,
but there are occasions that it might creep up
into wired networks too.
Cause we're talking about the wired networks
- at this time right now. - That's right, yeah.
So, what causes that,
what causes this fluctuation fluttering or non-connectivity?
Non-connectivity, okay.
So we'll leave intermittent connectivity till the end.
Let's address just no connectivity right away.
So no connectivity, this could be a couple of things;
as you can see, I'm on a laptop here.
One of the things that you'll see in your PC
is the ability to disable the network adapter.
And that could be a simple setting.
I just want you to think about a light switch, right?
You have lights in your house,
and you turn the light switch off;
obviously, it turns the lights off and you can't see, right?
We don't have lights in our home yet.
Okay, you're still working on that.
Still working on candlelight.
So maybe not so good for your house.
But if you think about the light switch,
there's nothing wrong with the lights,
there's nothing wrong with the switch.
It's just been turned off, and that can happen.
A lot of times, that can happen on keyboards more
than it does on your standard workstation and PCs,
because you have some kind of keyboard shortcut
that disables the network adapter
across the function keys of your keyboard.
But you can also disable it in the settings.
So sometimes it can just be simple.
It can be that simple, that it's just a disabled network adapter.
Other things that could cause the network adapter
to fail to connect to the network…
and again, I don't want to say that we just say right away,
it's a network failure, or a network adapter failure…
could be the fact that maybe you have recently
updated drivers, and if you update drivers…
Sure, that would make sense.
So think about what the driver does.
And we've talked about this before.
A driver is just a piece of software
that allows us to communicate,
and more importantly, our operating system
to communicate with the hardware.
And if your network adapter, like you rightly observed,
is managing network connections,
if that driver isn't appropriate,
then what ends up happening
is you could lose communications that way.
So that's a couple of things, right?
You could have a disabled network adapter,
you could have driver issues,
other things that can happen too.
You can see, like slower performance.
Slower performance can be a setting mismatch
that we can show you here in a bit.
It could be the configuration of your network adapter
in and of itself.
It could be a software setting,
where you have a certain few settings
that you have to configure to make sure
that your computer can connect to the network,
on how it receives a network address
or an IP address, as they call it.
And if that's configured wrong, you could have issues there too.
The other thing it might be too,
it might have absolutely nothing to do with your computer;
it could be the connectivity device
that you have plugged into.
- The device itself. - That's right. Yes, sir, absolutely.
So your home router or something.
Routers or the modems.
Yeah, ‘cause your home routers are typically configured
that when you plug into them, your computer says,
“Hey, I need this network address...,”
and it's called an IP address,
“to be able to communicate with a network.
Can you give me one?”
Well, if it's snoozing and it doesn't give you that address,
then you don't have connectivity.
Or an older one too for that matter.
It might be an older one,
and an older one is where you can get
some of these properties of your network adapter
that are just mismatched; they call it a duplex mismatch,
and we can definitely talk about that.
The final one that could happen,
especially when it comes to things
like intermittent communications on a wired network,
could be the fact that the cable itself is bad.
Well, I was going to ask you about cables.
- It could be the cables, right? - Sure.
Do you get pets at the house?
I have a cat that likes to chew on things.
- There you go. - And it has happened.
And it has happened, yeah.
Right through the casing, right into the wires.
Absolutely.
And what happens,
sometimes there's just a little breaking of the wire,
so you're getting a little bit of communication,
but like I said, if you stretch out or you move your desk…
not your desk necessarily, but your chair…
you notice that the network drops off.
It could be the fact that maybe the cat
that chewed through the sleeving a little bit too much.
We know those cats’ attitudes.
Another thing too, it could be the fact
that the cable's damaged in a way
like around the little connector part
that goes into the ports on your computer;
that could be slightly cracked.
It could be stretched out
if you happen to move the computer and you can't stretch wires.
You can, but they won't work too well after that.
And what happens is if you separate the little plug,
which is called an RJ45 jack, just call it an Ethernet jack,
from the sleeving of the cable and there's exposed wire,
what you've done is you've created an antenna.
And that means that EMI, electromagnetic interference,
is going to get into that cable and you could start to see
that the performance just is really horrible.
That makes a lot of sense. Sure.
So now at this point,
how do we fix all this and what are the solutions?
Okay, so let's double back on the network adapter being disabled.
So, I'm here on a Windows 10 machine,
and one of the things that you're going to notice
is that down here at the bottom,
I don't have network connectivity.
You'll notice that I don't have network access.
Right.
Well, with not having the network access here,
I could try to figure out, “Hey, what potentially is the issue?”
It could be the fact that the cable's just not plugged in;
it could be that, or it could be the fact that,
again, you have disabled the network adapter.
So for instance,
if you look at Ethernet properties of Ethernet here,
one of the things that you could potentially have
is you could potentially have it disabled
and completely turned off.
So for instance, this happens a lot…
this could happen in the old control panel.
So I went down to the instant search field
and I chose Control Panel here.
And when we launched that up, in Control Panel,
you'll see Network and Internet,
and inside the Network and Sharing Center,
you're going to notice
that if we choose on the left-hand side Adapter Settings,
that we've got a series of network cables here,
or excuse me network connections here.
And the one that I'm looking at really is this Ethernet0.
And notice how it's got this option to potentially disable it.
Well, that can happen on your workstations, too.
Now, if we look at it, it's disabled.
Well, here's the problem; being disabled,
it's no longer going to allow me to communicate.
There's nothing wrong with the cable,
there's nothing wrong with the network adapter,
and there might not be anything wrong
with the settings on your home router.
So you'd have to come in here and then looking here,
you would just basically re-enable it.
That is one thing.
And that is something that I have seen before
where your cable, everything else is okay,
but starting with the network adapter,
what we could see here is that it isn't connecting,
or it isn't connecting because it's disabled.
Could that happen just basically automatically or by itself?
I mean, without you doing anything,
just something happened and it disabled itself?
Not really. One of the things that I've noticed…
So it's a pilot error?
It could be an operation…
the operator error, but never say never.
So, we definitely have to worry about that.
Now the other thing, too, that we want to make sure
that we are aware of too, is that we want to make sure
of the properties of the network adapter here too.
And one of the things that I mentioned was the network address.
If I look in here, my network adapter is connected via USB,
this one right here is the interface that's connected.
If I right-click and I choose Properties,
these are the properties of the network adapter.
And if we scroll down here,
one of the things that we'll see here is that
there is this internet protocol version 4.
If I select that, you're going to notice that Properties shows up.
And if I choose Properties, one of the things that I can see
is that it's telling me to obtain an IP address automatically.
And that's where I said,
when you plug your computer into the home network,
or whatever the connectivity device is, it should say,
“Hey, I need an IP address. I need this network address.”
So enabling, that’s best practice?
It is on a home network.
It really depends. Some people want to…
my clients, I would absolutely say keep it obtained automatically.
But if you've got servers
or other dedicated hardware on your network,
you might want to statically configure this.
And if we look, that's where you could have a problem, too.
If any one of these settings in here are mismanaged
and they don't match what you have on your network,
then you're not going to be able to connect either.
So, I typically just leave this
to obtain an IP address automatically.
And then DNS is just the way
we resolve names out there on the internet.
And I make sure that that is chosen as well.
And then we choose Close.
The way you can find out here really easy
if you have an IP address is just a right-click on it,
and you choose the Status option.
And when you choose the Status option,
notice it's telling me IPv6.
I don't have any internet access, that's okay
’cause I'm not really using an IPv6 address right now,
so it's not bothering me, but this is the one.
And this is why we looked at this one right here,
the IPv4 connectivity.
So IPv4, is that still the most common?
It is because largely the internet is IPv4-based,
but for the long time we've been switching over to IPv6.
It’s been creeping in.
Yeah... soon.
But they've been saying soon for 30 years now.
If we look at Details here, this is really what I want to see.
And when I see Details, notice I told you,
obtain an IP address automatically.
That's something called DHCP.
That's the service that basically says,
“Yeah, here's your IP address.”
I have one. And I can see that that is the setting.
More importantly, I can see that it's handed me an address.
And it's handed me a subnet mask,
which helps me identify what network I'm on.
And then also the Default Gateway, which is just where we…
that's our connectivity device that's going to allow us
to connect over to the internet.
Now, once that's done, I'm going to close these down.
We can actually test the connectivity now
that we've made sure that the network adapter is enabled,
that it does have an IP address by typing in CMD
to the instant search field, that's the command prompt.
And you can run a simple test.
You can run a ping.
Now we can run a ping against our default gateway.
And if we get replies back, like we're getting here,
then that means I can at least connect internally
to my home router or my home connectivity device,
depending on what you're using.
But then we want to go a step further.
And if we want to test a little bit more,
we can test something out there on the internet itself.
So for instance, I can do something like this,
and this just happens to be an IP address that I…
and doing the same thing, doing a ping,
and then I'm going to do a 4.2.2 1.
And this is a high-level DNS server that's run by Level 3,
one of the major companies out there.
And it's usually always online
because it needs to be, providing that service;
and notice that it's responding back to me.
Now I know that I do have connectivity.
Now I will say, Zach,
one of the other things that I mentioned is,
some of the settings on your network adapter,
other than the IP address settings,
is things like driver settings.
And then there's something also that could happen
called a duplex mismatch.
And let me show you what I mean here.
So if I right-click on the Start button
and I choose this Device Manager option,
these are where all of the drivers are managed
within your operating system.
And if we look at Network adapters,
and if I was ever to expand this out,
and I was to see some kind of question mark,
or like a little exclamation point here,
it would tell me that there's something wrong.
Now I'm not having any issue here with the network adapter,
but I could select the network adapter
that I thought was having an issue
and I could right-click and I could choose Properties,
and I could see what the current status is.
And we could also do some driver management too.
So you'll see the Driver tab right here,
and that Driver tab would give me details on the driver,
and then we'd need to go out to the vendor's website,
and pull down the appropriate driver to make sure…
or just inspect it and make sure
that we have the appropriate driver.
The other one is some of the Advanced settings here on this tab.
And one of the things that might happen
is you might have a duplex mismatch within your networks,
and that's under Speed & Duplex;
it's typically set to Auto Negotiation,
but if the Auto Negotiation doesn't happen
and you're running in a different duplex
than what the computer picks,
you're going to notice the performance goes really bad.
So these are some of the things
just to keep in mind from the software side
that you could definitely check within your computer
to verify that the network adapter is functioning,
your setting are correct.
And that at least from this standpoint,
you don't have an issue, if you will, with those attributes.
So how do we fix the cat chewing on the cable situation?
Let’s address the cables.
So, we don't let the cat chew on the cables.
I'll tell you what, Zach;
let me go ahead and I'm going to set this to the side.
And if you could, we've got a cable over here.
We'll bring that into the picture here,
and gimme that little device right there, here.
So, if we take a look at here,
what we got, we've got a known good cable.
Now, if I suspect that the cable
that I have in my system is bad, right?
This is the one that we're plugged in with.
Then what we could do is we could use one of these devices,
and to test the cable what we would do
is we would plug one end of the cable
into this side of this cable tester.
And then we would find
where the other side of the cable is in there or is,
and then we would attach that to the other side.
Now, you don't have to have this together,
but for our demonstration purposes,
and let me turn this the right way
so we're actually reading it right side up; if I turn this on,
one of the things that you're going to notice
is that it's going to go…
and you notice how these lights are going down one by one?
Absolutely.
So what that's letting me know,
there are eight conductors inside of these network cables.
And it's letting me know that it's giving me consistency
between each one of the conductors on each side of the cable.
So that's a way that you can test the cable
and find out if there's an issue.
Now, Zach, do you have one of these in your house?
I have several.
Every room has a cable tester.
I think your nose is growing.
It is, and that's unfortunate as you know.
Yeah. And I realize that people
aren't just going to have one of these laying around.
We have them laying around here and I have one myself
because I do have to test cables for people from time to time.
And certainly, around here at ITProTV,
I can't tell you how many thousands of feet of cables
that they've run and they make their own cable.
So they have to test them regularly,
which is why we have a few of these on our networks.
However, don't fret.
You don't have to go out and buy one of those.
I said that if we were thinking
that the cable that we were using here was bad;
easiest way you could test whether the cable is,
is to test everything that we tested before,
and then take a known good cable and plug it in.
If your connection is restored, then at this point,
you've eliminated everything else.
The only thing left is a cable.
It's a bad cable, and it's time to replace the cable.
- Get a good cable. - That's right.
So those are some of the things that you can do.
Wes, thank you very much.
Absolutely.