using switch to split Internet

Cisco ASA Firewall dropping packets sporadically

So here’s an interesting issue I ran into with my Cisco ASA at home. It was working fine for quite sometime and then one day my wife told me that our Internet “was down”. I was on my wireless connection via my laptop at the time, and my wife was using one of our desktop computers. My Internet access was working perfectly but my connection goes out through a different firewall on my network. My wife was browsing through the Cisco ASA.

I went over to my wife’s desktop computer and I did all the normal Internet connectivity tests. I could communicate with the Cisco ASA fine, but I couldn’t ping outside of my network past the Cisco ASA Device. I then ran a recurring ping and I found that every few pings that I would get a successful ping but then the rest would time out. To me that says something was wrong on the external interface.

I went into my server room and checked on the connections because I have multiple firewalls hitting a switch which splits my Internet between them. Turns out the port the Cisco ASA was plugged into was faulty and dropping lots of packets. Bingo, problem solved!

-RP