Procurve 5406ZL Odd Routing issue

[Jerry_]

Hi, I have a strange problem with printing (and browsing http) across VLANs...

We have a 5406ZL with several VLANs and routing is turned on.

All of a sudden, printing on the network stopped working. The print server is on one VLAN and the printers are on another. Has always worked just fine and other server services like filesharing are not affected...

Printing works initally (for ~5 minutes) then cannot browse to printer config page or print to it. Maybe after an hour, sometimes the print job emerges. Can always ping the printers from any VLAN.

If I change the IP address of the printer, it works for another 5 minutes then something seemingly blocks all but ping.

No proxy on network, no firewall or AV and have tested it across multiple servers and PCs and all have same issue.

Am testing with all other switches removed and all devices plugged into this one switch.

I dont believe it is really a print(9100) related issue as cannot browse to printer config page either UNLESS I connect from a machine on the same VLAN as printer. It is only cross-VLAN traffic being affected.

Setup is like this:

VLAN 920:
10.105.178.0/23
interface: 10.105.178.1
Servers are on untagged VLAN 920 port and have IPs in this range.

VLAN 940:
10.105.180.0/23
interface: 10.105.180.1
Printers are on untagged VLAN 940 port and have IPs in this range (static) and are outside DHCP scope to rule out duplicate IPs.

I have turned off STP for testing (using BPDU filter) but no change.

As it is intermittent I guess it isnt a hard config problem and afaik this switch does not have any type of traffic filtering but welcome any assistance.

Thanks!

J

[parnassus]

First thing first: is the HP ProCurve 5406 zl updated? what version is currently running on? can you test if printing directly (not through a Printer Server) - so between your clients' VLAN and your printers' VLAN - the issue is still present? if ping is always OK all along the way (between Servers' VLAN and Printers' VLAN) it can't be a basic routing issue...there should be another nasty cause (Printer Server side or Printers side).

[Jerry_]

Hi Parnassus,

No, it is out of date and we were having a real problem finding the firmware for it.

By a series of trial and error config checks we seem to have resolved the problem...

It seems that it may have been some kind of vlan leakage issue from a switch further down the chain that had the wrong PVID on one of its interconnects. My thoughts are that when this traffic reached the routing switch it somehow caused it to block all cross-vlan traffic except ICMP.

Nothing was showing in the logs on the 5406 though and it was wireshark that did most of the work here.

Printers were working ok from the same VLAN it was only cross-vlan traffic that was affected.

Very strange (i know pvid mismatch can cause an issue but didnt expect one this tricky)

Thanks for the reply!

J

[parnassus]

Pretty strange that a PVID mismatch (so on untagged traffic only) can cause such impact...

[Jerry_]

Yes I thought so too. I suppose it could have been some anomaly not related to the config. It was tracked down to the penultimate and final switch in a chain of four.

My thoughts are that somehow the VLAN traffic was escaping into the other VLAN which, when it got to the routing switch caused it to misbehave somehow.

For sanity we have wiped the config on both and re-set up from scratch.