ARP Broadcast Storms and STP woes

[JeffIT]

Hi All,

For the past few months we've been experiencing "pauses" on our network. Everything will be fine, then everyone within a subnet pauses for about 5-60 seconds. There is no general slowness, just these pauses occurring several times a day.

My investigation has revealed ARP broadcast storms that correlate with these pauses.

Also, the switches are registering thousands of STP topology changes (dozens each day) that, again, correlate with the storms.

Our network core switch is a Nortel 8610. From there we have a mixture of ProCurve (39 of them) and older 3Com managed switches (6 of these).

I know that root priority is configured incorrectly. Everything is set to default and based on lowest MAC, our oldest, remotest switch is designated root. However, it was configured this way long before these problems started and to me it doesn't explain the topology changes.

This has been driving me crazy. Please help!

Thanks!!

 

[jimbopalmer]

http://it-services.triumf.ca/sysadmin/networks/nortel/8600/manuals/314725-C VLANS.pdf/

Page 175 set priority to near 0

I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[burtsbees]

Maybe someone plugging in a rogue device causing a switching loop? Is there a BDPU Guard feature in all of the switches?

Burt