Procurve Switch Setup

[carlday]

Hi All

I am hoping someone can help me setup our switches we have a procurve 9304 connected to servers then we have fibre links to each blocks switch which is a 2650 or 4108. What is the best way to setup the switches at the moment they are all setup as they were when they left hp except I have given them all static ip addresses. The mac address tables seem really messy some ports are reporting mutiple mac address on them and the ports that are the fibre links report almost every mac address in the school as being attached to them. Can I clear the mac address tables? Should the fibre link ports be reporting hundreds of mac addresses or not should they not just report the mac address of the switch they are connected to.

Any help would be great

Thanks

Carl

[Potato-Peeler]

As silly as it sounds would it be possible just to restore it to factory default and then give it the same static IP address that it currently has again?

[andyrite]

If there are no vlans then the switches will know about every mac address on the LAN. Not just the ones attached to them.

[carlday]

Is it good or bad the switches knowing all mac addresses? Can we clear mac address tables? so old entries are removed.

[K.C.Leblanc]

Are you actualy having any problems? As Andy has said all MACs should be listed, not just the ones connected direcly to the switch.

Is it good or bad the switches knowing all mac addresses? Can we clear mac address tables? so old entries are removed.

It's good, if the switches don't know the MACs they don't know which port to bung the data down.

Most switches the MAC table clears when you reboot the switch, but it'll fill back up very quickly.

[Geoff]

Yes, switches are supposed to know where all the mac addresses on a LAN are. Clearing the arp tables would do nothing as they would simply rebuild over time.

The only reasons you would want to do something about this is if your large arp tables are exceeding the memory in your switch(es). This will result in poor performance and/or crashing switches. The other reason is if you are having excessive broadcast traffic caused by ARP who-has requests.

Both situations can be alleviated by carving up your physical lan into several VLANs. Usually based on physical location (i.e. one VLAN per building/floor/department) and using your central switch as your router.

[carlday]

we are having some problems with network. First thing in morning people log on and don't get shared drives and problems with wake on lan. We were worried if all switches knew all mac address the magic packet for wake on lan is getting sent to the wrong place and ageing before it gets to the right place. We are unsure if it network switch related or not but thought now is a good time to check the switch and network setup.

[carlday]

If i was to create Vlans for each building will it cause problems with rm cc3 we have had problems in the past with rstp upsetting RM

[Geoff]

Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol has nothing to do with VLANs. I imagine the problem you had in that case is that you were setting RSTP on edge ports.

[jam3s]

hi carlday

You do not want to clear the Mac address table as its used to forward frames to the right port! Mac address however should age out of CAM when not used.
As for your switch configuration you may want to configure VLAN (subnet your network) and some kind of anti loop feature such as STP

VLAN's are usually recommended to break up your broadcast domain and save bandwidth!

how large is your network (e.g how many nodes)?

[localzuk]

we are having some problems with network. First thing in morning people log on and don't get shared drives and problems with wake on lan. We were worried if all switches knew all mac address the magic packet for wake on lan is getting sent to the wrong place and ageing before it gets to the right place. We are unsure if it network switch related or not but thought now is a good time to check the switch and network setup.

How many nodes have you got?

What bandwidth can the ports on the servers containing the shared drives use? ie. 100Mbit 1000Mbit etc...?

[carlday]

Hi

We have about 500 nodes the servers are connected at 100mb into switch, switches are joined together at 1gb.

[jam3s]

I would highly recommend connecting your servers at 1gbps as well as subnetting your network e.g VLANS

I believe its recommended to start subnetting when your reach around 100 nodes. I take it you have a flat network with no subnets?

[carlday]

Hi

We have a flat network no vlans. Does RM CC3 let you connect servers at 1gb also will rm build under a network with Vlans.

Carl

[localzuk]

I would highly recommend connecting your servers at 1gbps as well as subnetting your network e.g VLANS

I believe its recommended to start subnetting when your reach around 100 nodes. I take it you have a flat network with no subnets?

I agree with this. 100Mbps is not really enough sometimes. We sometimes manage to hit 300Mbps on our file servers etc... for ~300 nodes.

And the background ARP traffic will be using a fair amount also. VLANs are your friend here.