Wed, 27 Sep 2006
Cisco woes
I've got a message from Dan saying
that Odysseus is strangely slow,
he said that copying files to Odysseus simply hanged after few kilobytes.
I have tried to run tcpdump, and it seemed that Odysseus
did not send reply to some TCP frames. After figuring out that copying
data did not work even from my workstation to Odysseus, I started to suspect
the Cisco switch, in which I have upgraded the firmware yesterday.
Yesterday I have upgraded the firmware in some of our Cisco switches (in order to finally get SSH working on them). After looking at MRTG graphs for Odysseus, I have seen something like this (it was before 2pm today):
So for some reason, the link speed negotiation between Odysseus
and the Cisco switch has ended up at 100 Mbit/s FD, instead of 1 Gbit/s FD.
After restarting the negotiation using ethtool it works OK.
I hereby declare Cisco 3750 being a total crap. For example, while other switches can be rebooted in a minute or so, the boot of 3750 takes much longer, and even then, it takes another half a minute for the ethernet interfaces to become active (and it is this way even for newly plugged-in cables). Stay away from Cisco switches (at least for L2 switching, I am not familiar with their L3 gear). HP is much more open, supported, and generally better.
Sorry for the long delay between my previous post and this one. I have been off-line for 10 days, and I have been busy catching up with my mail queue since then.