After loading the latest bios flashes for these 2.04 on the 4900, 2.02 ont the 4400, 2.68 on the 3300. I lost all my windows 9x connections to my Novell servers. 3com had a twelve hour wait time for support so after a few days of waiting on hold I searched other sites but found nothing, Then went back and did a broad search on 3com and found:
Cause Spanning Tree is enabled by default. It takes approximately 30 seconds to go through the different states of spanning tree. During this time, the port is not in a forwarding state and the request for the server is not seen. Disabling spanning tree will not prevent loops, allows the port to forward immediately upon link. Changing a port to quick_forward allows participation in stp, but goes through listening and learning quickly, allowing the port to forward immediately upon link.
Disabling link integrity on twisted pair ports only, will never detect a dropped link or initiate spanning tree, forwards immediately upon link
Fix Disable spanning tree for the entire vbridge
set vbridge x stp mode disable
This was for the corebuilder 5000 but I thought I'd give it a shot. Turned off spanning tree protocol on all switches and everything is now GREAT!!!
Cause Spanning Tree is enabled by default. It takes approximately 30 seconds to go through the different states of spanning tree. During this time, the port is not in a forwarding state and the request for the server is not seen. Disabling spanning tree will not prevent loops, allows the port to forward immediately upon link. Changing a port to quick_forward allows participation in stp, but goes through listening and learning quickly, allowing the port to forward immediately upon link.
Disabling link integrity on twisted pair ports only, will never detect a dropped link or initiate spanning tree, forwards immediately upon link
Fix Disable spanning tree for the entire vbridge
set vbridge x stp mode disable
This was for the corebuilder 5000 but I thought I'd give it a shot. Turned off spanning tree protocol on all switches and everything is now GREAT!!!