Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

Basic Troubleshooting Tips

cable to the cable in appendix B, “Switch Ports and Network Cables” for pinouts and correct cable wiring. A category 5 cable tester is a recommended tool for every 100Base-TX and 1000Base-T network installation.

Improper Network Topologies. It is important to make sure you have a valid network topology. Common topology faults include excessive cable length and excessive repeater delays between end nodes. If you have network problems after recent changes to the network, change back to the previous topology. If you no longer experience the problems, the new topology is probably at fault.

In addition, you should make sure that your network topology contains no data path loops. Between any two end nodes, there should be only one active cabling path at any time. Data path loops will cause broadcast storms that will severely impact your network performance.

With your Series 8200zl Switch, if you wish to build redundant paths between important nodes in your network to provide some fault toler- ance, you should enable Spanning Tree Protocol support on the switch. This ensures that only one of the redundant paths is active at any time, thus avoiding data path loops. Spanning Tree can be enabled through the switch console, the web browser interface, or ProCurve Manager.

The Series 8200zl Switch also supports Trunking, which allows multiple network cables to be used for a single network connection without causing a data path loop. See the Management and Configuration Guide for more information on Spanning Tree and on Trunking, which is on the ProCurve Web site. See page 5-1for details.

Connecting to devices that have a fixed full-duplex configuration. The RJ-45 ports on the Series 8200zl Switch are all configured as “Auto”. That is, when connecting to attached devices, the switch will operate in one of two ways to determine the link speed and the communication mode (half duplex or full duplex):

if the connected device is also configured to Auto, the switch will automatically negotiate both link speed and communication mode

if the connected device has a fixed configuration, for example 100 Mbps, at half or full duplex, the switch will automatically sense the link speed, but will default to a communication of half duplex

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