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CS1000 E baystack/network configuration 1

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KillianK

Technical User
Oct 8, 2003
517
GB
Hi All,

Nortels recommends not using spanning tree but the customer wants it swiched on. HP switches having spanning tree turned on, I belive this is causing the Media Gatways to reset. I want to turn on fast learning on the ports that the cs1000 use. can anyone see problems between the baystack and the hp switches, if i turn on fast learning? we have six up links to hp switches from our baystacks.

Thanks,

Killian
 
You can use spanning tree but the problem comes with the delay inherant with switching to another port. I have done this to Cisco equipment.

If you have to turn on spanning tree only add those ports that are actually the uplinks to the HP equipment. Keep the other ports out of the spanning tree group. What I am doing now to Cisco is Multi-Link trunking on the baystack. Here is the basic setup.....See if this helps and if they can do something like this for you.

I've hooked several different Cisco devices running Etherchannel to Nortel 425/5500/8600 devices running MLT without problems. Not all Cisco interfaces support being bonded into a team, for example some of the built-in router ethernet ports don't support it. As mentioned you may need to look at STG settings... here are enough IOS commands to get you started:

interface Port-channel1

interface FastEthernet1/0
channel-group 1 mode on

interface FastEthernet1/1
channel-group 1 mode on

If you need something other than the default VLAN 1 you'd add something like this to the interfaces above:
switchport access vlan 2
 
I think that was to me...and thanks for the info. Just trying to help others.
 
You could either (1) disable spanning tree on the Nortel CS1000 interfaces, or (2) enable fast-start on the Nortel CS1000 interfaces. Either way, this would not affect the HP switches in your environment, provided that you never disconnected those CS1000 interfaces from the CS1000 and instead created a layer-2 loop in your environment.

I've also had problems with the CS1000E MGC (media gateway cards) not being stable with standard spanning tree group in-use on the network interfaces and found that by changing them to fast-start, the stability issues were resolved.

As tnphoneman indicated, the problem is with the delay in port usage caused by STG. By turning off STG or enabling fast-start STG on those ports, you will not get the delay is port usage that you normally experience with STG. (it's a 30 second delay any time the interface is disabled/enabled, including unplugging and re-plugging in the cable, and... strangely enough, whenever you reboot the MGC.)

I believe this is the command line instruction from a configure terminal that will allow you to enable fast-start (fast learning) on your STG ports.

Code:
spanning-tree port [unit/port[-unit/port][,[unit/port[-unit/port]] learning fast
 
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