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Chapter 5: Operation
If monitoring connectivity to a device on the same subnet as the switch’s internal Ethernet node, set the switch’s monitorip
address and monitormac address parameters to the IP address and MAC address of the device being monitored. If monitoring
connectivity to a device on a different subnet/ network than the switch’s internal Ethernet node, set the switch’s monitormac
address parameter to the MAC address of the gateway router on the switch’s subnet, and set the monitorip address parameter to
the IP address of the device being monitored. This allows the PING packet issued by the switch to be routed through the gateway
router to the target device on a different subnet/net work. If you don’t know the MAC address of the target d evice or of the
gateway router on the switch’s subnet, one method is to open a command prompt window on a PC attached to that same sub-
net and use the “arp -a” command to retrieve this information from the PC’s arp cache (you may need to PI NG the IP address first
before the entry will appear in the arp cache).
Rather than manually configuring the monitormac address, you can also configure the switch to automatically determine the
proper MAC address required for the PING packet. Enter the monitorip address information as noted above, and then set the
monitormac address parameter to 00 00 00 00 00 00. This causes the switch to issue an ARP request to the gateway router,
which will respond with the appropriate MAC address information needed.
NOTE: When the Auto Switch feature is enabled, manual switching can be performed, but will be overridden by any auto
switching commands that are subsequently issued by the switch.