[clue-talk] network issue

[Nate Duehr]

dperkins at techangle.com wrote:

>>>IT claims that special switches tha
>>>      
>>>
>>I assume that you were about to say that your IT group thinks switches
>>of a quality high enough to understand proper spanning-tree are
>>supposedly too expensive and unavailable to you?  If that's the case,
>>they're taking the risk that a single cable plugged in wrong can bring
>>down their network, and it's not a commercial quality network, IMHO.
>>    
>>
>
>Oops.  I guess I didn't finish that sentence.  You're right.  They say the
>switches are too expensive.  But to prevent the problem from happening
>again, they confiscated all of our switches.  And since we talk to the
>PLCs in our products via Ethernet, that poses a big problem for me, since
>I can no longer test multiple systems.
>
>It's the typical management reaction.  Rather than fix the real problem,
>they implement some inane policy.
>  
>
Ahh, there's always a "reasonable" solution somewhere hiding in there...

Will they buy you ONE switch and let you move your testing environment 
completely off the company LAN?

I'm not understanding how your multiple systems could have caused this 
problem, anyway... each system is an end-point, not a loop...?  Unless 
I'm missing something in the story.  You mentioned "plugging a cable 
into two ports on the same switch"... that should never be necessary at 
all... in a non-spanning-tree network you've created a Layer-2 loop... 
on a spanning-tree enabled network one of the ports would automatically 
shut down... so either way, it wouldn't work.

Can you explain a bit more on what you're trying to accomplish?

It sounds like it "worked" for a while and then stopped working.  What 
changed?

If it's none of our business, that's okay too... of course.  ;-)

Nate