network switch question

[Gregory Nowak]

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Hi all.

I have a 5 port switch here, plus the uplink port. I recently ran out
of available ports on the switch, and not wanting to buy another one,
I decided to take my firewall/server machine, and hook it up to the
uplink port using a cross-over cable. The other 5 machines are hooked
up to the regular ports with standard category 5 patch cables. Yes, I
know the uplink port is meant to connect 2 switches to one another,
but I figured that I could do what I've done, since the server does
dns for the lan, and provides the internet connection to the rest of
the lan. 

When 4 out of the 5 of the other machines are hooked up and running,
plus the server on the uplink port, everything is just fine. However,
if I plug in and power up the fifth machine, on the port right next to
the uplink port, no machines on the lan can communicate with the
server, and communication between the machines themselves is very slow
(we're talking 130 Ms averages for pings from machine to machine). If
the fifth machine is just plugged in but off, everything is fine. This
starts happening when the network interface on the fifth machine comes
up. I should mention that the fifth machine isn't the problem, since
this happens with the 4 other machines, provided that one of them is
hooked up to the port which is right next to the uplink port
(I.E. this happens with different cables, and interface cards). If I
unplug the server from the uplink port, and plug in and power up all
other 5 machines on the regular ports, communication from machine to
machine on the lan is just fine, until I plug the server back into the
uplink port.

Considering what I've done by plugging my server into the uplink port
with a cross-over cable, is the behavior I'm seeing to be expected, or
is my switch messed up in some way? If this behavior is to be
expected, then I'm curious to know why it happens, so can someone
knowledgeable please explain what's going on? Thanks.

Greg

P.S. The server itself isn't the problem either, since if I plug it
into one of the regular ports with a regular patch cable, everything
works just fine. Also, the  cross-over cable is good too, since I've
tried it directly from the nic of one of the machines to the server's
nic, and the 2 boxes communicated just fine.

- -- 
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