How often do you restart your Cisco switch?

[malaize2]

Hi everyone,

We had a Cisco Catalyst 2950 switch that had a really loud fan. I contacted Cisco and they sent us a new 2950 which I just replaced the old one with yesterday.

I was thinking and realized that I had never restarted the old switch in the 2 years that I have worked here. How often do you restart your Cisco switch? Some of the nodes on our network would experience slow network dataflow when the old switch was still installed. Now that I have installed the new switch the users tell me that their network dataflow speed has increased. I just wonder if it was just because of a new router being installed or what.

thanks, malaize

 

[vipergg]

Unless you are having some type of problem you don't need to reload . If they has slow response then you would need to track that down , usually is a speed or duplex issue on a user interface or a connecting interface . We have devices that have been up 3 or 4 years . They only get rebooted if there is a problem or we decide that we need to upgrade due to security reasons or whatever.

 

[Zen37]

I`ve never had to reload a switch unless i was doing some sort of upgrade. Those things are like rocks man, they don't move unless you want them to move.

 

[PalmTest]

Only if the Power fails and no UPS is installed or with an IOS upgrade I reload my switches.
They happily run for years, just like ViperEgg says.

 

[DrGreen26]

I have more than 40 cisco switches and I never reboot them unless I do an IOS upgrade.

Mark C. Greenwood, CNE
m_jgreenwood@yahoo.com

With more than 10 years experience to share.

 

[malaize2]

Thanks a lot for all of the replies. Maybe the speed increase is due to the fact that the old switch had 3-5 ports set to half-duplex transmission and now I have all of the ports set to Auto (full-duplex).

Thanks, malaize

 

[DrGreen26]

A rule of thumb. If you can hard set your speed and duplex, you should. THough I have encountered devices that require auto / auto.

Hard setting the device and hard setting the NIC is a good practice just to eliminate one area of troubleshooting.

Mark C. Greenwood, CNE
m_jgreenwood@yahoo.com

With more than 10 years experience to share.

 

[jneiberger]

I would actually recommend the opposite, that you *always* set both sides of your connections to AUTO unless you must manually set them. Manually setting them with newer equipment can cause duplex mismatches.

I know that sounds counterintuitive but some devices still expect to see an autonegotiating link partner even when they're set manually. If they don't detect an autonegotiating link partner, they will assume that they're connected to a hub and will drop back to half duplex despite the manual full duplex setting.

 

[DrGreen26]

Wow, I would like to know what kind of devices those are? We have a hospital here that I work for and there are more than 1000 network devices. About 80 - 90% are pc's the rest are medical devices and we dont seem to have what you described unless the device has a gig network card installed, then we have to auto negotiate that in some instances.

Mark C. Greenwood, CNE
m_jgreenwood@yahoo.com

With more than 10 years experience to share.

 

[jneiberger]

This is actually a very common problem that I see regularly. The heart of the issue is that the Fast Ethernet specification does not describe interface behavior when manual settings are used; only autonegotiation is mentioned. There is no standard behavior for when manual settings are used, and vendors haven't been consistent.

When configuring settings manually there are two behaviors:

1. Continue to participate in Nway autonegotiation but only offer the manually configured settings;

2. Only use the manually configured settings and do not participate in Nway negotiation.

If you hard code your settings you will run into problems if you connect a device using behavior #1 to a switch using #2, which describes all of Cisco's switches that have come out in the last three or four years.

Sometimes, depending on vendor implementation, if a device using behavior #1 does not detect an autonegotiating link partner, it tries to be helpful and drops back to half duplex because it assumes that it is not connected to a device capable of full duplex. I still see this from time to time but it was almost a daily occurrence for a couple of years after we did a network-wide switch upgrade. We upgraded from 2924XLs that use behavior #1 to 2950s, which use behavior #2.

I discussed this problem with Cisco and I succeeded in convincing them that AUTO is the recommended setting, and they've changed their documentation to reflect that.