Compatibility

[Kragten]

Is there a problem if you connect switches from a different brand to eachother?
Please let me know!!

Greetz

Stagaut

[Lance Brown]

Generally no, unless you are trying to use proprietary features or even some industry standard ones.

Your question is too broad to say yes or no.

[Ron Kinner]

You can always connect two switches together with a crossover cable. The only problem you might have is with autonegotiate but usually the switches will let you set it manually to full duplex so that part is usually not a problem.

If you want to get fancy and do trunking (passing vlan info from one to the other) then you have to make sure that both switches are using 802.1q. This should not be a problem with any recently manufactured switch since it is an industry standard but cisco equipment generally preders to use ISL instead so you may have to change it from the default.

Spanning Tree Protocol should work over multiple switches from different makers but make sure that the timers are all set the same and make sure that the root bridge that gets chosen is the one you want.

Connecting more than one cable between switches in order to increase bandwidth (Etherchannel) is probably an iffy matter. See:

http://www.cotse.com/nix/networking/cisco/fchan_in.pdf

Ron

[Kragten]

thanx guys for the info.