Weird network timeouts with Powerconnect 5324

[kngzeng]

Hi, recently we purchased two used Dell Powerconnects 5324 of from eBay. They arrived completely OK and both looks perfectly fine. But when we connect them to the network, the network begins to behave weirdly. Any ping to any other computer on the network will end with a constant 10-11% lost packets. And the situation gets worst when we try to connect both to the network, since we have a second floor on the building, we need to have a switch for each floor, and connecting both to the main switch on the server cabinet will cause even greater amount of lost packets making the network very unstable.

 

My first guess was that STP was configured incorrectly, but I can verify that the root switch is the one in the main server cabinet, tried resetting the switches still nothing, updated the firmware and boot code to the newest version and still having the same issue.

 

Researching a bit more about the issue, I found some articles about setting an uplink port on the switch and I think I haven't configured this (first time configuring a network with multiple switches). Doesn't connecting the switch on any port to the main switch just works? Can someone give me some insight on how to configure a network with multiple switches, because it seems to be more complicated than I expected it to be. 

 

 

P.D.

Network configuration goes like this;

Firewall & NAT: PfSense box

DHCP, DNS, AD: Windows Server 2012 R2

Clients: 35-45 computers, printers, mobile phones, NAS etc...

Two access points, one for workers and one for guest access managed by PfSense.

[Eniqmatic]

What's your config? 

[kngzeng]

4 hours ago, Eniqmatic said:

What's your config? 

I used the configuration from this guide:

 

http://www.stevejenkins.com/blog/2011/05/dell-powerconnect-5324-setup-tasks/

[Lurick]

I'm almost wondering if there is possibly a spanning-tree loop. Are you just connecting the new switches to the core using a single cable, multiple cables, or multiple cables in a port-channel?

[Eniqmatic]

Could be, OP do you have port fast enabled on the switch? What other devices have you got connected other than PC's as above?

[kngzeng]

5 hours ago, Lurick said:

I'm almost wondering if there is possibly a spanning-tree loop. Are you just connecting the new switches to the core using a single cable, multiple cables, or multiple cables in a port-channel?

Single cable, we have 6 cable runs to the switch available to be used, and my plan was to link aggregate 2 or 3 of this cables to the switch. But to discard any possible issues with link aggregation I've only connected one link to the switch.

 

4 hours ago, Eniqmatic said:

Could be, OP do you have port fast enabled on the switch? What other devices have you got connected other than PC's as above?

No port fast enabled on the switch, all settings are on the default. In total we have 8 static computers, and like 10-12 laptops that come and go, 6 printers and the servers (Windows Server 2012, PfSense and FreeNAS). None of them have given any problems since before we installed this Dell PC 5324's everything was running fine with dumb switches.

 

 

Update #1:

 

Disconnected one of the switches from the network, now running only two switches, core switch and one powerconnect 5324. I was surfing around the GUI of the 5324 and at the same time pinging directly to 5324's IP, and when I leave the GUI still and don't touch anything, the pings respond fine with <1ms, but whenever I change menus or look at any tables, the response time goes nuts, responding on +150ms and/or timeouts. I'm beggining to believe we got faulty 5324 switches :c

 

Update #2:

 

Pinging the Switch and a computer on the network at the same time and doing what I did on Update #1 shows that the timeouts somewhat correlates to each other, if there is a timeout on the switch, there is also a timeout on the computer and it seems that by giving the network some load i.e. a YouTube video, the response times get better, instead of the +150ms, maybe <100ms in average. And not neccesarily the timeouts are because I'm on the GUI, even me just writing this post the network still seems to get ramdom timeouts...

[brwainer]

14 minutes ago, kngzeng said:

Single cable, we have 6 cable runs to the switch available to be used, and my plan was to link aggregate 2 or 3 of this cables to the switch. But to discard any possible issues with link aggregation I've only connected one link to the switch.

 

No port fast enabled on the switch, all settings are on the default. In total we have 8 static computers, and like 10-12 laptops that come and go, 6 printers and the servers (Windows Server 2012, PfSense and FreeNAS). None of them have given any problems since before we installed this Dell PC 5324's everything was running fine with dumb switches.

 

 

Update:

 

Disconnected one of the switches from the network, now running only two switches, core switch and one powerconnect 5324. I was surfing around the GUI of the 5324 and at the same time pinging directly to 5324's IP, and when I leave the GUI still and don't touch anything, the pings respond fine with <1ms, but whenever I change menus or look at any tables, the response time goes nuts, responding on +150ms and/or timeouts. I'm beggining to believe we got faulty 5324 switches :c

You can't test a switch by pinging the switch itself, the little CPU that runs the UI is really not fast. That CPU has nothing to do with actual switching. You need to be pinging something else connected to the switch, so that you are testing the connection throughthe switch fabric.