Catalyst 3550 and Intel 550

[myersn024]

I work for a school district and we've recently purchased several Catalyst 3550 switches to add some ports on different campuses. There are five campuses and each has its own vlan. However, every time I try to hook one up, within five or ten minutes the whole campus loses connectivity. Once the switch is unplugged from the network, the connectivity comes back in about five minutes.

So far, I've only really had this problem when I've hooked the 3550 up to an Intel 550. When the connectivity goes down, a couple of our servers start spitting out error messages that look something like this: SAP routing error: Node xxxxxxxxx claims address A0000102 should be A0000020.

It took a while to find the node addresses that were causing the errors, but I finally did. The node addresses are the mac addresses of the ports on the Intel 550 that I've had the 3550 plugged into.

So, will the 3550 not work with the Intel 550 or is the 550 just not configured right? Any help will be greatly appreciated as I've been pulling my hair out for the last three weeks trying to find the solution. I've tried configuring the switch every which way I know how, but nothing has worked. So...I'm beginning to think that the probelm isn't with the 3550. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the long post.

 

[vipergg]

This looks like misconfiguration though I can't tell you where as i have no clue with your Intel switch . It looks like maybe you are getting some type of spanning tree loop or along those lines . You are going to have to look and see how each vendor inplements spanning tree and also look at other things like port speeds and duplexes to make sure those are ok also . You don't really specify if you are using the 3550 as routers or just plain L2 switches , still looks like config problems though .

 

[vipergg]

Just by looking at your error message from the ipx servers it almost looks like you are somehow hooking 2 different vlans together somehow as you are getting mismatched ipx addresses . this would definetly take down the network , look carefully at each confiuration and make sure when you connect the switches together they are in the sam vlan .

 

[myersn024]

To clarify, the Catalyst 3550 isn't being used as a router, just an L2 switch. The Intel 550 is the main switch for the campus where I'm trying to add the switch. The 550 is connected, by fiber optic cable, to our main router for the entire district.

The vlan I'm trying to add the switch to is a 10.20.0.0 subnet. All the ports on the switch are set to access vlan1. I was under the impression that the vlan the ports accessed were local to the switch and wouldn't cause any problems leaving it alone. Am I wrong? Do I need to configure the vlan20 interface on the switch and then tell each port to access vlan20?