Uplinking between Cisco 2950xl and Intel 510T

[ncowdery]

I am currently phasing in a new set of cisco switches but have still got some intel 510T switches linked in. I need to uplink from the cisco switch to the intel by using 4 cat5 cables in full duplex mode to give me a 800mbps uplink between the switches.

At present the intel is configured with 4 ports at 100mbps in full duplex mode but I am unable to configure my cisco switch to talk to the intel on four ports. I can only seem to get it to work with 1 port which is causing a bottleneck.

Please can someone point me in the right direction or asisst with some commands that would enable me to complete this task.

[peterbeckman]

If you are trying to use Etherchannel to have these four ports talk as one it will not work. Currently each vendor uses it's own algorithm to determine how packets will traverse the link. These algorithms are not compatable the link does not work as required. Sometimes it will not work at all, sometimes the first link has to be saturated before the second link will send traffic.

[ncowdery]

When I connected the second port with a cable all the switches on the network went crazy. Should i let this die down or will it just not work.

I was led to believe that connecting the two devices would be easier than this

[Erick Bergquist]

That is spanning tree kicking in and doing it's job. Since you probably aren't going to get 'etherchannel' to work between the devices 1 of the links will forward only and rest will be in blocking state.

There is a recent standard , IEEE 802.3ad (LACP - Link Aggregation

Control Protocol) which lets you do this if the devices support it. Newer switch IOS's do but I'm not sure if the XL series does or if Intel does offhand.

You may be able to get Etherchannel to work w/the Intel switch if you manually configure port channel to on for the ports on both sides (no auto-stuff) and hard-code the speed/duplex. I've heard other people got it to work between cisco and other vendors but your milage may vary.