Constant pause frame count on port with Zyxel 1123-NI AP

[smrbrts0]

I've got an HP 1810-24G where the pause frame counter continually increments whenever I connect my Zyxel 1123-NI access point. I've got two of these APs and it happens with both and is consistent when I change ports on the HP. 

Question 1: I mirrored the port with the counters increasing to another and tried to grab a wireshark trace but see no pause frames. Do these frames get mirrored?

I'm not sure how to tell if this is even causing an issue. I don't perceive one, but it seems odd with all the hardware I have connected that only these two devices cause this to happen. 

I think the counter just reached 400K in about 20 hours.

[Ian Vaughan]

Wowzers, 

400K pause frames in less than a day sounds like a high number but how much traffic are you pumping through those ports over that same period? 

This article - http://jeffq.com/blog/the-ethernet-pause-frame/ - is a decent bit of background reading of how a guy's SOHO router turned his TV's pause frame into a "Frame of DEATH!" on his home LAN. 

He has some good tips about doing the packet capture and debug. 

Might be worth seeing if the AP's have a newer version of firmware available. 

Are you even able to enable flow-control on a 18xx series switch port?

Your switch doesn't sound like it's doing anything harmful but it might be worth investigating teh throught put to see if they are genuine "slow down / back off" requests from the AP hosts. 

Let us know what happens. Kudos button is there if this helped :-) 

thanks

Ian

[smrbrts0]

Thanks for that referral. It was decent reading. I think he was able to capture the pause frame because his switch was forwarding it as a multicast. I tried mirroring the port and I just don't see any pause frames, and I'm not sure but that this might be a normal behavior since the pause is meant for the layer 2 device (switch). In some of the other reading I've done, I've gotten the impression that not all switches mirror these frames.

The Zyxel firmware is the latest.

I haven't run any stats to look at throughput, and I should, but I wouldn't expect a ton of throughput really since those AP probably never have 10 clients associated with them, and typically less than 5.

The HP does have an option to enable flow control, but I didn't really want to do so until I understood what those frames were all about.

I'll keep digging.

[smrbrts0]

I replaced the Zyxel 1123-NI with the newer Zyxel 1123-ACv2 units and the rate of pause frames dropped from hundreds of thousands over a few weeks to 100 over a few weeks. I'm done researching.