On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 8:24 AM, Raymond Norton <admin at lctn.org> wrote:
> What is the best tool to use for diagnostics?

Well, sounds like a job for wireshark (packet capture). Alternatively,
you can use tcpdump to capture (something like this will write
captured packets out to packet.log: $ tcpdump -w packet.log).

Once you have a capture, you're going to need to know what to look
for, which is something of an art. If you have a loop in your network,
you'll likely see thousands and thousands of broadcast messages.
During typical network traffic, broadcast packets only account for a
small percentage of total traffic, but during a broadcast storm, these
packets will comprise the vast majority of packets you'll see.

Bummer that your switches are web-only, but hopefully you'll still be
able to get some good data out of them. Look for port errors, link
up/down messages, etc.

Try and narrow down the issue to a certain time, a certain combination
of client/server connections, etc.

-Erik