Avaya/Nortel 5510-48T Flow Control issues...

[americanmcneil]

I have several stacks of the 5510's deployed. We are slowly upgrading to them from our old Baystack 450's. Anyway, the first few stacks are in our PCI DMZ so they are monitored by a TripWire device. The TripWire monitors the switch for any config changes and reports them to us.

I told you guys (and girls) all of that to tell you this. I have disabled flow control on the uplink ports of the 5510s in order to match the static configurations on the other ends of said connections. Well I keep getting reports from TripWire that Flow Control has been enabled on said ports. There are only two people who know how to get into these switches so there is no one else logging into them and making this config change. The switch is making it on its own.

What I am looking for is the how/why. Can I really keep this from happening and if not, is it really that important?

As always, any help is appreciated!

Americanmcneil
Network+

Now: Assistant Network Administrator
Then: Area Network Coordinator
Wireless Network Engineer/Integrator

 

[anthonyanderberg]

Flow control usually gets negotiated automatically along with the speed/duplex - do you have them hard-coded? Perhaps there is a bug where the switch is autonegotiating flow control if it also negotiates the speed and/or duplex. Nortel added the option to autonegotiate all of the above but only advertise/accept negotiations that resulted in a given combination, that might be another thing to look at and/or try.