What causes a port on a switch to have a faulty link?

[jason.murphy]

I am trying to run a distributed simulation on a closed network and I have been having some issues. I moved all of my machines participating in the simulation to the same switch (cisco 2950) but I notice that a few of the ports have faulty links only while the simulation is running. I do not believe that this is being caused by a bad piece of hardware but I am not ruling it out either.

I would like to know what else can cause a link to be faulty so that I can continue my investigation into the problem?

Any help is appreciated and thanks in advance,

Jason

[b.hsu]

If a port is in the faulty state, it indicates a hardware problem. Issue the show test command for module diagnostic results.

[sourabhagarwal]

you can run "show post" command to detect any hardware problem on 2950.