The Procurve, The Realtek, The Laptop and a hint of apple....

[Shortround]

We have recently purchased a HP Procurve 1400-24g switch, (Not the managed switch I had hope for, "but that's education for you" as they keep telling me), to go into our Apple mac suit. The switch is uplinked via fibre. If I hook-up a Imac to any port the device sense a connection but will not pickup an IP. The room also contains 1 PC which has the same issue as the Imac(s). Yet when I connect my laptop it works fine (Any port including said IMac(s) and PC drops). We have another switch daisy chained off of the Procurve, all devises connected including said PC and Imac(s) work fine when connected to this switch.

I have tried the following:-

Used same network drops and switch ports and I get the same results
Set the speed and duplex settings on both the PC and Imacs without success
Tried a static IP on an Imac again will not talk to the rest of the network

As already stated we have another switch daisy chained off of the Procurve and any device we plug into it works fine, so basically the Procurve is currently acting solely as a Fibre adapter for that part of the network.

P.S. I have also tried disconnecting the daisy chained switch again this did not help, pity the other switch does not have a mini-Gbit port and 10/100/1000 ports.

Any ideas???

[diggory]

Wondering if it because your laptop may have only a 10/100 port like the old switch that works.

If that's the case it may be that the 100M connection works but with auto negotiation on the macs and PCs it tries for 1G, but the signal doesn't reach.

I did have that once with dodgy cabling (Cat 5E that was too long for gigabit).

I assume you've tried 100M Half duplex on the macs? - (you may have to unplug the cable before setting it).

I did wonder about crossover problems, but the 1400 has auto Auto-MDIX for that.

[Shortround]

Yes I had tried all speed and duplex combinations although I did not remove the cable each time. I have re-run those tests this morning removing the cable each time I reconfigure the settings, but to no avail.

Length of cable can't be an issue, the Imac I tried this morning has a cable length of no more than 20ft from machine to switch and the cabling in this room is a little over a year old.

We have 18 Imacs and a PC in this suit all displaying the same issue.

I would like to try another nic in the PC as it has an onboard Realtek chipset, Unfortunately the only other Nics we have are also Realtek based. (Having an order placed for a good inter pro nic for testing.). Having said all that the Imacs have the Marvell Yukon 88EC042 chipset and I thought they were suppose to be a decent nic.

this is going to be a long day......

[Ric_]

Have you tried taking the switch out of the cab and plugging an iMac dirtectly into it? Uplink the switch somehow and you can rule out your cabling.

It's entirely possible that your switch is fu.

[Shortround]

I have tried another switch, we purchased 2 Procurve 1400-24g switches at the time and no matter which one I use the Imacs and pc display the same issue. I have the other switch on my desk, I guess I could uplink it and test the Imac on my desk.

[Fuzzz]

What kind of core-switch do you have? It might be a VLAN-config problem. If the ports on you edge-switch aren't set to the same VLAN as you core-switch you can't communicate over the network, though you get a physical connection (the link light goes on). (I had this problem once with our Cisco gear)

[alexsanger]

What is the second switch and how/what speed is it connecting? Is it auto-negotiating or fixed?

Is there a firmware update available for the 1400? We had connectivity problems with a 4000 series a while ago which were resolved with a firmware update.

Can you browse to the IP of the switch and get into the config to see if there are any informative errors coming up?

[Shortround]

The Procurve 1400 is an unmanged switch

[alexsanger]

Hmm. That'd be a no then.

Have you got a managed switch that you could conect it to/to it so you can see whats coming back from the ports?

If not, I have found the nice Dutch chaps at Procurve support very helpful in the past!