On Fri 17 Dec, 1999, "Walsh, Warren (MN65)" Walsh_Warren@htc.honeywell.com wrote:
We recently converted our 330 and 540 from FDDI to 100BaseT. We found that we had to manually force both the 100BaseT card in the toaster and the specific port on our Cabletron Smart Switch 9000 to 100BaseT-FD. For the 100BaseT card, it was simply changing the auto to 100tx-fd:
ifconfig e5 `hostname`-e5 mediatype 100tx-fd netmask 255.255.248.0
Funny how that auto-negotiation thing never really works, and how much it really affects performance.
Funny, I was only talking with a friend today about how autonegotiation between Sun's and Ciscos works fine, and how Cabletron kit has such irritatingly non-functional autonegotiation in contrast.
In my last job, running any number of Su's, SGI's and NetApp's using Cabletron switches the network guys and I always went hunting for the ports where the collisions were high and the autonegotiation had been left on, or turned back on.. As policy we decided to pin both ends to 100BaseTX-fd no-autonegotiation, because anything else was markedly less effective.
This wasn't the only problem we had with Cabletron kit though - there were some horrors with the spanning tree reconfigurations, and pakcet fragmentation, and adjacent switches somehow bollixing sets of ports on other switches.
Put me right off Cabletron as a networking equipment vendor I have to say. YMMV.
I always quite liked FDDI: most of our filers were on FDDI and, perhaps because of the extra smarts in the cards, the performance was always pretty darned good.
We even got our biggest machines their own Gigaswitch ports - though I never figured out if the cards (DEC cards in NetApp, DEC gigaswitch) went into the full-duplex mode that the DEC network engineers though they might be able to do when plugged straight into the Gigaswitch.
Sure made cabling in the machine room easier using FDDI too. Until they put decent amounts of structured wiring in.
-warren
Warren Walsh Honeywell Technology Center -- End of excerpt from "Walsh, Warren (MN65)"
In the immortal words of mark (mds@gbnet.net):
This wasn't the only problem we had with Cabletron kit though - there were some horrors with the spanning tree reconfigurations, and pakcet fragmentation, and adjacent switches somehow bollixing sets of ports on other switches.
Ho ho ho. It gets even worse once you turn on their "SecureFast" VLAN software (which is neither) and your "Smart" switch (which is not) starts playing entertaining games by caching arps and auto-disabling ports for you. Ever had moving a single machine from one port to another turn into a three hour enterprise involving repeated calls to a senior support engineer? "You will..."
Not that I'm even slightly bitter about having had to manage one of those damned things for 9 hellish months.
We now return you to our regularly schedule list.
-n
p.s. never, ever buy Cabletron. never.
------------------------------------------------------memory@blank.org Now we've got to think here. Now let's see. What would Brian Boitano do? http://www.blank.org/memory/------------------------------------------
We even got our biggest machines their own Gigaswitch ports - though I never figured out if the cards (DEC cards in NetApp, DEC gigaswitch) went into the full-duplex mode that the DEC network engineers though they might be able to do when plugged straight into the Gigaswitch.
While we use the DEC FDDI cards, we didn't do the software work to enable DEC's full-duplex FDDI mode. I suspect it wouldn't be terribly difficult, but so few customers would gain we never figured it was worth even a small effort. In fact, other than when I asked a few years ago, you're the first person who has ever brought it up to my knowledge.
-- Karl Swartz Network Appliance Engineering Work: kls@netapp.com http://www.netapp.com/ Home: kls@chicago.com http://www.chicago.com/~kls/
mark writes:
This wasn't the only problem we had with Cabletron kit though -
Did you enjoy the cranky, confusing and decidedly non-orthogonal telnet UI? That sad piece of work in my ESX1320 switch soured me wrt Cabletron almost immediately after getting it. It looked to me that it had been designed with the single goal of fitting it into a 2K corner of ROM.
I couldn't even upgrade the firmware from that UI. Was forced to handcraft a sequence of SNMP writes to accomplish that. Pahh!
Solid hardware, I'll admit. No failures at all in 5 years.
We'll probably give that thing away now (to someone I don't like :-)
-
Bruce Walker -
kls＠netapp.com -
mds＠gbnet.net -
Nathan J. Mehl