cisco vs. dell switch on fedora
Les Mikesell
les at futuresource.com
Fri Jan 7 17:41:56 UTC 2005
On Fri, 2005-01-07 at 09:20, Paul Stewart wrote:
> Use *real* switches..;) Cisco all the way...
Ummm, have you priced Cisco gig-capable ports compared to Dell...
> I *believe* that Dell gets their switches from 3com but could be
> mistaken... if that's true it would explain more... we rip 3com's out of
> production all the time to replace with Cisco...:)
No, it has to be SMC - the specs are identical.
> > i am having a heck of a time getting a dell 5324 switch to dhcp
> > directly to a couple linux boxes i have hung off it.
> >
> > enabling portfast on the cisco switches instantly fixed this problem,
> > so i was suprised to see no change on the dell 5324. it's like i
> > changed nothing at all.
Just guessing: you probably have Ciscos on the same LAN and they
are refusing to use the Rapid Spanning tree standard with
other vendors, preferring to first attempt their proprietary
PVST+.
> > i have also disabled STP on the ports in question, but it still takes
> > 1-7 seconds or more for the link to come up. this conflicts with a 5
> > second timeout in the network scripts.
You really don't want to (and maybe can't) disable spanning tree
completely on a switch. It is what keeps the network from melting
when someone accidentally - or intentionally - makes a loop among
the switches. The Cisco portfast setting just makes it forward
packets while making the decision, which is still a little dangereous.
> > for now we have upped the timeout to 15 seconds in the network scripts
> > while we hunt for a real solution.
Here is a link to a pdf describing how to make the Ciscos cooperate.
I'd think it would make sense for a dhcp client to check for
link before sending anything, but that's just me...
--
Les Mikesell
les at futuresource.com
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