network switch question

[Brian Moore]

greetings.  this is common amung cheap switches. the wiring between port 1 
and the uplink port is shared so that only one of them can operate at a 
time.  never understood the logic behind this since it can't save much money 
but I have seen this lots of times including on my own 24 port linksys 
switch.  hey, they probably saved 50 cents in the production process doing 
it that way.

Brian.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg at romuald.net.eu.org>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 2:00 PM
Subject: network switch question


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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.
>
> - -- 
> Free domains: http://www.eu.org/ or mail dns-manager at EU.org
>
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