As an IT guy, call the IT guys. Just because you see a network light, does not mean that the port is active. The link light indicates connectivity, not function (the blinking green activity light shows traffic on the port. It may be administratively down, and not allowed to pass traffic.
Either way, life is easier if you let IT do the work, or guide you through the process. They may not need to come on site to do the work, but will certainly be more upset if they need to come on site for something that you’ve done on your own and caused another problem that they have to fix.
I built a network for a new casino. Before the opening we told everyone that they were not to plug anything into the network unless it was authorized by an I.T. person.
Opening night about half the casino goes down. We start running around like mad trying to figure out what is going on. Finally we track the problem to one specific closet, but we can’t reach anything on the data vlan behind the (multi-layer) switch in that closet. So we head down.
Turns out, one of the employees, in an effort to be helpful, plugged in a ‘switch’ which he had brought from home into the network to get wifi.
The problem was, it wasn’t a switch, it was a router. A router that had DHCP enabled by default. So when it was plugged into the network it wanted to be the DHCP server. Considering that we already had a DHCP server with a bunch of different scopes, this didn’t work out all that well and it took down everything on that vlan**.
That employee got an ear full from about 5 angry I.T. guys.
Never, ever plug anything into a work network unless you are the admin or have permission.
Slee
*Note, we had a bit of a whacked setup in the room where the guy plugged in the router. We didn’t have enough ports so we inserted a dumb switch and turned off port security. Not the best solution but we couldn’t wait for the engineers to pull more network drops. Anyway, the guy just had to have wifi for his laptop even though we had wired his desk and his laptop never left the desk. He was no longer with the company within a week.
**Vlan is virtual LAN. Basically it segments ports on a switch so that one port may be on a network 192.168.10.0 /24 network and the port right next to it is on the 1962.168.20.0 /24 network.