Well this is making strides. Firstly, thanks for replying I appreciate it, Secondly, I tried what you suggested, connecting the two switches to each other with a very short (5m) CAT5 cable and the PC's could see each other and ping each other without packet loss. AKA no problem.
Let me further explain the network setup. My house here in Cranston SE was built without networking in every room, there is also no tube from the top floor to the basement so I couldn't run a cable. The basement is where the firewall/server and the cable modem sits. The only other solution was to use the existing phone line in the one room upstairs, which is rated at CAT5, I simply re-wired it to 568B standards* to cascade (daisy-chain) two switches because there are two PC's upstairs but only one wire (the old telephone wire) So the switch was needed for this activity. Since each port on both switches supports auto-mdi/x there was no reason to make the cable a crossover cable.
So the answer to your question is, the length of the cable between the two switches is about 35ft. The SMC-EZ6505TX-CA switch was purchased from london drugs and the Eusso was purchased from techtronics, both switches operate perfectly when used standalone, IE no cascading.
-j-
*568B = from left to right - orange-white / orange / green-white / blue / blue-white / green / brown-white / brown
Michael Petch wrote:
Hooking up 2 switches together generally is not a problem.
But I have to ask. What is the length of cable between switch 1 and 2? I'm thinking that if one of the switches is not boosting the signal that the intermittent problems might be related to the length of one of the cables. Would be curious to know what types of lengths we are talking about. And whether it is possible to connect the 2 switches up (As a test) sitting next to one another with a very short cat5 cable.
Mike
On Fri, 2004-03-19 at 15:36, Jon Copeland wrote:
I'm having some difficulty finding out what could be the problem in the following scenario.
http://members.shaw.ca/jonno/Images/misc/lan_diagram.jpg
Switch1 is attached to Switch2 via a straight CAT5 cable, the Switches each have Auto mdi/mdix capability and are both different brands (SMC 5 Port and Eusso 5 port). Any PC attached to Switch1 that tries to ping the server will receive intermittent replies.
http://members.shaw.ca/jonno/Images/misc/the_ping_results.JPG
From the server you can ping anything on the internet. It has 2 NICs in it, one connected to the cable modem and the other connected to Switch2 (eth0 and eth1 respectively) (NOTE: The server is *NOT* where the problem lies, my suspicions lie with the communication between the two switches.) <-- The reason for these suspicions is because when I plug the CAT5 cable that connects these two switches directly into the cable modem I can get an IP address from my ISP and browse the internet normally. This is how I'm able to send this message. (The cabling is fine, all the wiring has been crimped according to the 568B wiring standard. And since I can see the internet when Switch1 is directly attached to the cable modem it can't be a wiring problem between Switch1 and the Cable Modem or Server)
Since both Switches support auto-crossover (mdi/x) on each port they should be able to be daisy-chained together using a normal cable (I've also tried a crossover cable). So in essence any PC's connected to Switch1 *should* be able to talk to any PC's connected to Switch2. And this is not what is happening, well, the ping replies shown above tell us that communication between Switch1 and the server is happening intermittently for some obscure reason. This is where the problem is.
I have swopped the two Switches around and I get the same problem. My conclusions lead me to believe that the problem arises when the two switches are connected with each other, IE, any PC on Switch1 cannot *fully* talk with any PC on Switch2.
Previous to this the network was working fine as all the PC'S including the server were attached to one Switch so there was no 'daisy-chaining' involved.
Is there something that I'm missing out or something that I'm not doing?
-j-
_______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
_______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
