ndart

Cheers mate that's really good adivice. I'll do this tonight me thinks...

HI, No your not being patronising at all and what you have suggested is a standartd procedure which the company in question has tried but I have not.... I will be trying this one out myself soon I fear. We have now some new transceivers to try too.... I'll keep in touch and many thanks for the help...

I agree with all you have said. However these checks I have completed by unplugging everything and plugging it all back in until the switching becomes excessive. Our network suppliers did this too and maintain that when they were plugging in the segments as soon as any of the segments started to be plugged in again the switching started to be excessive which IMHO points to the switch. Also, you are correct the port has not been set up it seems. Having said this on trying to set it up I cannot even get a link light let alone anything else. It seems the port is dead! Any ideas on that one. I appreciate the comments and support with this by the way and thanks for taking the time and effort to respond....

Having laboured over this switch I have deduced that the ASYNC0 which should be active and has a static IP of 192.168.242.242 does not WORK!!! I have copied this from the hardware manual: Out-of-Band Ethernet Management Port The out-of-band 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet port is dedicated to management traffic on the AT-9900s switch. Use it for initial configuration and on-going management tasks. The default IP address for the port is 192.168.242.242 to allow remote access. This port is reserved for management only; the switch does not transmit frames between this port and switch ports. I have tested this with my Fluke tester and it comes back with an error and NO link light! Do I have to activate this port or something? There is nothing I can see in the instructions! Any ideas anybody? At this rate I am not going to be able to link a laptop to it to test it and configure it or use wireshark....am I missing something or is this port faulty?

We think we will get another switch. If you have tried these the Async0 port does not connect! I have tested it with my Fluke tester and it reckons it is a short. Is that a faulty switch in your opinion.

We have already. The excuse is, if we need more switches, they come and install and that's all. They insist on us taking out an expensive network management package with them. I think you are right. I think they should have documented it and also handed it over in a timely fashion. I have vented my concerns to little avail. We have ordered some transceivers and I have managed to download the manuals. I have configured a netbook with wireshark on it and I will attempt to connect this up to the switch to see what's going on. Later on in the week when (and if) we get the transceivers we will replace both up and downlinks to see what happens with that too. Severing the links will be interesting in itself I think.... Thanks so much for the help so far, invaluable guys....I'll keep you informed...

I agree it would be interesting to logon to the switch with a remote station and try wireshark on it. Unfortunately the company did not leave any docs at all so we'll have to download it all and try this. Many thanks everyone for the ideas and thought so far....

Yep, we agree....this is what we think too....

Many thanks. We'll connect the switch when we can and take a look...

The installers have not set up the switch so that we may access it. I will have to refer to the company who did the work before I start attaching laptops to the managment port. In terms of a loop, we have checked as much as we can for this and it doesn't seem to affect everything, just limited it seems to our two main fibre switches. Actually I have to agree the behaviour is indicative of a loop. I will contact the company to see if they have any problem me connecting a laptop to the managment port...thanks very much for your thoughts and we'll look for the loop etc...

Unfortunately we have too many connections to do that and not enough ports. Many thanks for the idea though and many thanks for looking and replying...

Hi everybody, Wonder if anybody has experienced this kind of thing: In the last few months we recently had a company upgrade part of our aging HUB controlled cat5e network with cat 6 switches. We now use gigabit to the desktop which is great. All seemed ok for a bit... Then we had some segments starting to lose some ports! This required resetting the switch in that area. This resolved the issue temporarily. Since that time all sorts of areas have been affected. We thought maybe some power fluctuations could affect the switches and indeed we have data via PowerChute which goes some way to confirm this so we have protected the most troublesome areas with SmartUPS units. However, this to our surprise has had little or no effect! We regularly on almost a daily basis now have 3 key areas which exhibit this issue and randomly others. We have a large network over a very spread out campus with many fibre segments going back to two central fibre switches! We have had the network installers back to check for storming switches and transceivers etc and they apparently did find an issue although reluctant to share this with us at the time of discovery. Even with all this the issue still exists and is inconveniencing many staff and making the situation difficult for us in IT Support as we have: 1. Checked the network for storming switches and hubs ourselves (A massive undertaking) 2. Checked for damaged cables 3. Checked for damaged network cards 4. Checked for damaged storming WAPS, min switches etc. The only thing we have identified is that the new MAIN switch in question an AT 9924SP seems to fluctuate very quickly indeed and is the main fibre core switch that the company installed along with a number of new AT switches (copper) around the campus. The existing MAIN switch which is identical we had before did not exhibit this behaviour. Only since the other switch has been installed does the whole lot exhibit this manic behaviour. And another thing, we have to reset the remote segments first thing in the morning! Why is this? We are considering purchasing a spare AT 9924SP switch (Not cheap) and changing it out to test the idea that the new core switch may be at fault so.... The upshot of all this is: Our network seems less reliable since we have upgraded to full Gigabit, the company responsible for the upgrade has already attended, corrected an issue and felt nothing else was wrong even though they accepted that the switch seemed overly busy, we have checked the other switches around the campus, all computers and printers and other devices for errors and as much cabling as we can and found nothing obvious except the main (apparently chattering) main switch. So the questions are: 1. Has anybody else experienced this kind of thing, if so, what was the resolution? 2. Has anybody else had experience with this switch AT 9924SP and modules ATSPSX, mini gbics? What do think of Allied Telesis switches? 3. Does Power have an effect on switched networks in your experience in relation to brown outs and spikes? Do you need to UPS protect the switches for this issue and in which case even though they are smartUPS and protect against spikes and surges and over charge under charge why do they appear to not have an effect? Many thanks and apologies for the long post. I appreciate any comments and answers.