Sunday, October 31, 2021

Hard shutdown of server when network cable plugged in

Firstly, I am not very familiar with the intricacies of networking, just the basics. I'm an electrical engineer doing some initial checks before handing over to the IT department.

I have a PC at work that runs on Windows 7. Suddenly, it did a hard shutdown and was unable to boot from the front panel; I had to power cycle to initiate a reboot.

After some initial fault finding I've found that the PC runs fine with the network cable unplugged, and I can't find any errors in event viewer to suggest why the shutdowns have happened.

If I plug the network cable back into the motherboard, the PC conducts a hard shutdown almost immediately. I've tried the onboard NIC and same issue, eliminates faulty board?

The network cable comes from a CISCO smart switch. I've tried swapping the network cable for a known good one and swapping ports on the switch, issue persists.

My only idea is that this is PoE and there's a short, causing the PC to force shutdown to protect itself. If this was the case, wouldn't you also expect the network switch to have issues? There's no errors shown on our network interface for the switch, but it does show the port status as down (obviously).

This is now out of my hands and passed through to IT but my intrigue is getting the better of me.



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