SOLVED Remote Desktop Issues

[Remo]

One other person and I access a server that is hosted in my home to do work on QuickBooks financial software. We have been using the system for about 18 months, and up until now all has been well. The other person logs in remotely over the internet. I actually log in locally, staying on the the 192.168.1.x network here in the house.

Very recently I have started having problems. When I connect to the server I get disconnected either immediately or a within a few minutes. There is no consistency in how long I can stay connected, but it is always too short to get any serious work done. I get reconnected OK, but the new connection will fail right away and the system tries to connect again, over and over.

I checked all the network connections and everything looks fine. Both my computer and the sever can access the internet. I can ping either way between the server and my desktop. No changes were made to either the RDP service on the server or the RDP client on my desktop. I have run updates. There was nothing major added and running the updates made no difference to the disconnection issue. I switched the ports in my local hub and I replaced the patch cord. No difference.

Why has RDP suddenly become unreliable?

 

[Remo]

We have a wireless access point that is also a 10/100 switch. We noticed it was coming up with some weird light configurations then noticed that they correlated to network link issues we have been seeing. We swapped out the hardware for another similar device we own and the problem has been resolved. Looks like it was a network hardware failure.

 

[Trouble]

Thanks for the follow-up info.
Much appreciated.
Nice job on the troubleshooting.

 

[Remo]

My son, who works professionally in networking, lent a hand in the evening. He ran a continuous ping, "ping -t" and we saw dropouts which timed exactly with the odd light behavior on the access point / switch. Initially, we replaced the switch, but further checking showed that it was actually a power supply failure and we reinstalled the access point with a new power supply and it continues to work fine. Also, as a part of our checking, we ran the input ethernet cable directly from the router to the sever, bypassing the access point / switch. This test also showed that the problem was in the access point.