A Few Questions on these wonderful switches

[Xtremewave]

Good day all.

Well i finally got my first order of 8 port switches and 6 port mini's in and have a few questions before i deploy them in my field.

First things first, I have to give out a great job guys in designing a nice layout on the switch, i just love that you have imputed under the ports tab the ability to only have total statistics on the ports that i want to monitor. This will come in handy!

So now with the questions that i have.

Is it correct in my understanding that this switch has the ability to have multiple connections from tower to tower? And if so how are you guys setting this up on the switch as currently i have deployed a back up link that i manually turn on and off (with a Tough switch with turning on the poe on or off ) if i have issues with the main link and would like to set this up so the switch will do the work and not have to have me monitor this connection and turn it on when there is issues with the main connection.


So to get this deployed i believe i have to do the following:

Assuming that i have ports 1 and 2 on each of the switches to do this connection, i would go into the LAG tab and click Source/destination IP check box. then on the ports i would click "enable" on both Port 1 and 2. after this is where i am lost,

what is the Key? is this were i put in the ip address of the source/destination?
what role should i use? LACP-A, LACP-P , OR static
now i know that the priority is which port is the master and which is the slave, and the lower number is the master. Correct??

Next I would click the STP tab,
enable the STP
what version do most of you guys use? RSTP or STP,
and then click enable on ports 1 and 2.

is this all i have to do?


Next question i have is can some one explain to me under the device , configuration tab , what "Storm Control" does please.

and thirdly, back in October i asked if these switches had a timer to set to auto restart the switches each week/month and cannot remember who posted that this was available, but the problem is i have looked though the tabs and cannot find where this is located.


Thanks in advance

Dave Meier

[sirhc]

Well i finally got my first order of 8 port switches and 6 port mini's in and have a few questions before i deploy them in my field.

First things first, I have to give out a great job guys in designing a nice layout on the switch, i just love that you have imputed under the ports tab the ability to only have total statistics on the ports that i want to monitor. This will come in handy!

Thanks

So now with the questions that i have.

Is it correct in my understanding that this switch has the ability to have multiple connections from tower to tower? And if so how are you guys setting this up on the switch as currently i have deployed a back up link that i manually turn on and off (with a Tough switch with turning on the poe on or off ) if i have issues with the main link and would like to set this up so the switch will do the work and not have to have me monitor this connection and turn it on when there is issues with the main connection.

There are several ways you can do this STP/RSTP is the most common way used in a Flat network. I do not run a flat network at my WISP so I use a router at each tower and use OSPF

But the ToughSwitch also supports RSTP so I am not sure why you would manually handle this fail over by turning POE ON and OFF? With RSTP you can specify which link is favored meaning it will use that link first and only use the other link if the favored or primary link fails. The way we implement RSTP is industry standard so a quick Google of RSTP and read the wikipedia explanation and you will have a better understanding of RSTP and how it works. The only problem with letting RSTP handle this failover is a wireless link can get into trouble either from saturation or interference which "could possibly" cause RSTP to flap. Now the ToughSwitch does not do LAG but this would not be a good solution for this anyway.

So to get this deployed i believe i have to do the following:

Assuming that i have ports 1 and 2 on each of the switches to do this connection, i would go into the LAG tab and click Source/destination IP check box. then on the ports i would click "enable" on both Port 1 and 2. after this is where i am lost,

what is the Key? is this were i put in the ip address of the source/destination?
what role should i use? LACP-A, LACP-P , OR static
now i know that the priority is which port is the master and which is the slave, and the lower number is the master. Correct??

Next I would click the STP tab,
enable the STP
what version do most of you guys use? RSTP or STP,
and then click enable on ports 1 and 2.

is this all i have to do?

I am not sure what you are doing here? LAG stands for Link Aggregation and I would not use LAG with wireless connections unless maybe with 2 AF24 links and even then I am not sure the wireless bridges would properly pass the control packets?? You would have to do some extensive testing.

Once again Google LACP and read wikipedia on how this is used. I create a LAG to connect my router to the switch at each tower so that my VLANs going to each AP which are 10/100 links that will issue pause frames are divided up across 2 physical links. You can see how I do a tower setup in this post by clicking HERE.

There are 2 types of LAG we support, Static, and LACP. Now LACP can be Active or Passive but you will read about this in the wikipedia page on LACP. It just has to do with how the ports advertise to each other. You will also learn what the Key is but basicly an LACP Key just identifies which port groups belong together.

I would not see any reason to use STP unless dealing with older equipment that does not support RSTP. STP is in there just in case someone is using OLD equipment.

Using LAG to combine two links between towers is dangerous the way the standard protocol works. Also the way the standard is both links have to have the same physical links state which means you would not LAG an AF24 and a PowerBridge unless you forced the AF24 to only link at 100MB.

We use a Static LAG between our Cisco and the switch because Cisco does not support LACP on most routers but they do with their switches and switch cards for routers.

Next question i have is can some one explain to me under the device , configuration tab , what "Storm Control" does please.

and thirdly, back in October i asked if these switches had a timer to set to auto restart the switches each week/month and cannot remember who posted that this was available, but the problem is i have looked though the tabs and cannot find where this is located.

Storm Control just allows you to specify how many packet per second are allowed of 3 different types of packets (Broadcast, Multicast, and Unicast). Personally I do not use this feature as I do not allow anyone to have Layer 2 access to my WISP network so this is not really a problem we have but some people do so it is there for them. So basically you enable it and you select how much of any of the 3 types of packets you will allow before the switch drops that type of packet.

Everything we do in the switch "at this time" is using industry standard protocols which means other than simplifying the interface the switch handles the protocol pretty much the same as any other switch with pretty much the same knobs and dials to tweak the protocol.

[sirhc]

Also with WS-8-250-AC ports 1 and 2 are special ports that can also power airFIBER 5/24 with 48VH 1.5A using all 4 pairs so I would not use those ports to connect to anything else unless you do not plan to power an AF at that site.

Ports 1 and 2 will also power standard 24V and 48V only using 2 pairs if you do not have the need to power AF links at that location.