I got a mail from one of the faculty member's that his connection wasn't working. I couldn't determine what was the problem, and given that it was the end of the week, decided to check up the switches over the weekend [Here, Thursday and Friday are weekends]. Yesterday I found some machines in the graduate labs were still configured with the old gateway x.x.x.254, which unfortunately started malfunctioning over the past week - intermittently starts/stops working. The actual [new] gateway is supposed to be x.x.x.253. Before I got down to checking up the switch nearest to the professor's pc, I wanted to make sure he didn't have his default gateway also set to the old one [this could explain his on/off connection]. Its the weekend, he's not here, and I really shouldn't put it out till saturday - if it IS something wrong with the switch, swapping it for another one would really mess up things during working hours.