ports on 5308 and 2650 going off-line/on-line 3 sec intervals,

[jtilenius]

Any ideas would be appreciated,

We have a core 5308 and 10 access layer 2650 switches. Around 50 servers and 200 PC's. In a 24 hour period, various ports will go off and back on for a 3 second delay. We have hard coded the speed and duplex on the ports that are having collisions and duplex mis-patches. Upgraded all the switches to the latest version....HP J4899A ProCurve Switch 2650
Firmware revision H.08.53


I 06/08/05 07:04:20 ports: port 11 is now off-line
I 06/08/05 07:04:23 ports: port 11 is now on-line
I 06/08/05 07:04:42 ports: port 11 is now off-line
I 06/08/05 07:04:45 ports: port 11 is now on-line
I 06/08/05 07:33:58 ports: port 2 is now off-line
I 06/08/05 07:34:02 ports: port 2 is now on-line
I 06/08/05 07:34:21 ports: port 2 is now off-line
I 06/08/05 07:34:27 ports: port 2 is now on-line
I 06/08/05 07:39:52 ports: port 10 is now off-line
I 06/08/05 07:39:55 ports: port 10 is now on-line
I 06/08/05 07:39:55 ports: port 10 is now on-line
I 06/08/05 07:40:14 ports: port 10 is now off-line
I 06/08/05 07:40:15 ports: port 10 is now on-line
I 06/08/05 07:41:31 ports: port 8 is now off-line
I 06/08/05 07:41:34 ports: port 8 is now on-line
I 06/08/05 07:41:53 ports: port 8 is now off-line
I 06/08/05 07:41:53 ports: port 8 is now on-line

Thanks for the help,

Jeff

[Les Ligetfalvy]

Have you edited out recurrances from your post, or do they only toggle a few times and settle down? If they settle down, then it is a "normal" part of the bootup negotiation process. I say "normal" in a guarded tone as it may vary by NIC and/or OS.

If the toggling continues, look at power management settings and also look at the cable plant or power ground loops as a source.

[jtilenius]

Hey Thanks,

Well we went to the finance area where this is happening and hard coded all the NIC's to 100/full and changed it on the switch port to match. Also went into power management settings on the NIC's and turned this feature off, on maybe 4 people we swapped cables when they still had issues after we hard coded the speed and duplex. This was all recommended by HP. So now we still have this port toggles. We have a fluke meter which tells us the PC's connected to each port, we ask the users if they have been rebooting, all have been left on line. I read several of your posts and some helpful ideas, is this just a common occurance with HP switches that they can't seem to fix?

[Søren Fisker]

I've always believed this to be a technical issue that should be worked around in firmware.

I've been through the same suggestions as you have.

Even if Les's suggestions work, I don't really see the use for HP network equipment if we can't use it with XP power management, speed autodetect and we need state of the art cabling to run 100 Mbit/s.

I've been fighting HP's socalled support for 6+ months on this, so don't hold your breath...

Regards,
Soren

[Anton Pikhteryev_2]

Have exactly the same problem in the lab. Can't stand it! Will HP support comment on that?

[Jonathan Axford]

Just to join in on the action, I suffer exactly the same problem on a few of my 5300 series switches...

The logs are constantly full of port fluctuations the same jtilenius specified in the original post. Would be good to hear from HP to see what they think....

[SCOOTER]

Hello Jeff,

What kind of problems do you experience when this happens? All I see in the small piece of log that a node boots or reboots.

Does this "behavior" cause severe networkproblems or are you just annoyed that there are a lot of entries in the log?

Don't get me wrong here, I'm just trying to understand what happens?


Regards,

SCOOTER

[Søren Fisker]

HP support is useless in this field. I fought the danish network support about 6 months. They will keep saying that is power management, bad cabling, bad drivers and so on. And then they'll run you through disable IGMP, STP, LACP, driver upgrades etc. all of which won't make the slightest difference...
And since the supporters won't acknowledge this as a problem, they don't report it to the engineers and it'll never get fixed.
This really sucks because Procurves are great products...

And apparently the engineers don't read forums because this has been discussed sooooo often :(

Regards,
Soren.

[Manfred Arndt]

Hi Søren,

Thanks for the kind words about ProCurve products, but sorry to hear that support has not been able to help you resolve this adaquately.

This can be very difficult to diagnose, since there are so many things that can cause auto-negotiation problems, including bad cables, bad drivers/fw, bad nics...but you know this already.

Do you have a known configuration that causes this problem? The more specifics the better -- the engineers can only fix issues if we can reproduce the problem.

Does this only happen with specific clients? Have you verified that this problem also occurs with a known good patch cable?

Do you have a Fluke cable tester? If not, this is usually one of the best investments you can make -- not to say that this is your problem, but I can't tell you how often I have run into "marginal" cables in the field that seem to work intermittently.

Regards

[Manfred Arndt]

Soren,

Sorry about your mangled name -- cut and past changed the character set on me after posting.