Managed Switch Problems and Wireless Bridge

[ICBM]

I have a situation which is a little out of the ordinary. I have 6 wireless bridges (SMC 2891W-AG). I have 3 at our main office, and the other 3 are at 3 different locations. The 3 at the main office connect to a small 5 port D-Link switch along with the WAN side of a router. With the current switch everything works great, acts like all radios are on a local LAN, I can ping and access their web configurations all from the main office.

I purchased a new switch to replace the D-Link because the router we are going to be using needs a 10Mbps port which doesn't have auto-detect. I picked up the HP ProCurve 1700-8 because I could manually set the speed of a specific port. I am not using the VLAN or any of the other features. From the settings it appears everything is on VLAN 1 which basically means it acts a a non-managed switch on all ports I believe.


Now comes my problem. I swap out the D-Link with the HP, all ports light up properly. I plug my laptop into a spare port and see if I can access all the bridges. I am able to access all the bridges at the main office, but I can not access any of the remote bridges. I check to make sure they have signal, and all are showing to be connected at the typical signal strengths.

I switch back to the D-Link and see if everything works, still no remote bridges. I reset the local bridges, they connect to the remote bridges but I still can't send any data across. So I go and reset the closest remote bridge, and everything works between those two bridges. At that point I thought I just needed to move to the HP switch and reset all the remote bridges, so I tried that. Radios would connect to each other, but I could not send any data through the connections. I switch back to the D-Link, reset the remote radios and I can access everything from any of the bridges.

I am thinking it has something to do with HP switch not mapping those remote bridges to its memory, but I have no idea how to correct the problem. All the radios have static IP addresses. Other than the problem with the bridges the HP switch works great. Any thoughts on what is going on or how to correct the problem?

 

[spidey07]

Sounds like mac address settings only allowing so many addresses on the switchport or possibly some loop detection stuff. Normally those aren't enabled by defaut though.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Sounds almost like cisco port security type issue where a device will only talk to a set mac address, whether this is something static or auto learned is the question. After installing the new switch have you tried power cycling all involved equipment to see if it will talk to the new mac address? Or is this what you are referring to when you say you reset them?

 

[ICBM]

Thanks for the replies. Yes reset = power cycle.

To test the mac address/security settings I guess I could just plug the new HP switch into the old D-Link and see what I am able to ping. I could also just plug the HP into our main LAN switch and see if I can replicate the thing without even involving the radios. I will give this a shot this afternoon and report back what I find out. Thanks again.

 

[ICBM]

I just finished doing some additional testing using our main LAN switch. I plugged the HP into our main switch and then my laptop into the HP switch. Everything worked properly and I was able to see all computers on the LAN and they could see me. So it would seem that any type of port security/mac address issue isn't what the problem is.

Going through the HP switch settings, I found two things that looked kind of suspect to me. Under the VLAN settings, I can set whether to have individual ports VLAN aware. By default all ports are VLAN aware. I am curious if disabling this would solve the problem.

The other suspect setting was LLDP which was defaulted on for all ports. I would think LLDP would help me, but maybe not. This is something I will need to try as well.

I find it troubling that I have to go and reset the remote bridges even if I change back to the old switch. I am unable to do any additional testing with the bridges due to everyone being back in the office. Does anyone else have some other thoughts or ideas?