A very long time ago (mid-November 98), when I got my F720 filer with Gigabit ether, I tried to connect it to an Extreme Summit48, had trouble, contacted NetApp, despite excellent suggestions still had trouble and appealed to this list. Got a few "let us know what happens", but unfortunately no real leads.

The story has a happy ending, and here's what did happen.

First off: Gigabit on F720 to Summit48 works great. That's settled.

Also, with the help I got from NetApp (Mark Smith, Tim McCarthy, David Zwick, Devi Nagaraj, possibly others!), if I had been actually able to concentrate on the problem for more than 30 minutes at a time (and more than 60 minutes per week :-), I might have noticed what was going on earlier.

What the problem turned out to be is: on both of the Summit48's I had available to me to test the Gig ether link, the port I was using, always port 50, was missing from any VLAN list. What *that* means is that although the port appeared alive, no packets were ever delivered to that port from any other and it quietly acted as a packet sync for anything received from the filer.

Now how did port 50 end up off of all VLANs, on both switches? Simple!

Right after I first received my brand new switches, I had trunked the two fiber links on the two Summit48's together, just to see if it would work. I ran fiber from port 49 on one to port 49 on the other and 50 to 50. When the F720 arrived, I moved one fiber link (port 50) from the second Summit48 over to the 720 and unconfigured the trunking.

But what happens when you unconfigure a trunked port on a Summit, apparently, is that the port ends up not being on *any* VLAN. The port is "alive" but nothing is routed to or from it.

So, I reconfigured the affected ports (put all ports back on the Default VLAN) and the G/B link to the 720 now works just fine.

There's still one small "cosmetic" glitch. When the filer comes up, it always reports that the G/B link is up, then right away that it's down. The last console message is always "e8: link down". But it is up (or I couldn't type this mail), so I'm not overly concerned.

Do I really need Gigabit ether to an F720? Possibly not. I've only managed to drive the link to 1.5 times the speed of a 100Mbit link so far. But with the prices of Summit48's back when I bought them, I figure the Gig interfaces came for free. Plus, this way I don't have to trunk 100Mbit ether ports and waste good sockets on the switch.

And anyway, I'm always adding more clients to load down the filer. That reminds me: has the Progress db been certified yet?