[c-nsp] Appletalk (don't laugh) through Cisco switch

[Church, Chuck]

Jeff,

	I ran into a similar issue a few years ago.  From what I could
tell, Macs and Appletalk-speaking HP jetdirects couldn't all agree on
either the Appletalk zone, or the cable number.  All devices were on the
same VLAN, but it spanned over 6 different switches.  I'm speculating
that a client coming up possibly didn't see other clients on the network
(maybe due to VLAN pruning??), and picked it's own.  When I threw a
Appletalk speaking router on the network, all issues went away.  Any
Cisco router will work.  Keep in mind, you only need to enable appletalk
on the one interface attached to this VLAN.  Make sure your cable-range
is big enough to support all clients (if I remember right, a single
cable number can support 128 devices).  HTH. 


Chuck Church
Lead Design Engineer
CCIE #8776, MCNE, MCSE
Netco Government Services - Design & Implementation Team
1210 N. Parker Rd.
Greenville, SC 29609
Home office: 864-335-9473
Cell: 703-819-3495
cchurch at netcogov.com
PGP key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x4371A48D 


-----Original Message-----
From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net
[mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Jeff Kell
Sent: Wednesday, July 13, 2005 7:47 PM
To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [c-nsp] Appletalk (don't laugh) through Cisco switch

Jeff Kell wrote:

> "We have researched this problem and discovered that there is a known
> issue with running AppleTalk through a Managed CISCO Switch."

To answer some replies already received, and to clarify the original
situation...

> Are all the Mac's on the same Vlan on that switch?

Yes.  It is an old 8Mb 2924-XL actually now (the 3550 was just the 
uplink), we tried a 2950 with same result, and "downgraded" to the 
2924XL to see if it helped).  The ports in question are all on vlan192.

> Apple computers come up on the network card very fast.. And I found
> that I had to enable portfast on every port...

We do that religiously on host ports (portfast).  Configuration of the
ports is simply:

> interface FastEthernet0/xx switchport access vlan 192 spanning-tree
> portfast

We do have some subnets in the core routing Appletalk, just not to this
particular building, and have never had issues before.  Been doing this
long time no problems.


> Jim is right about the portfast.  That has caused me a lot of grief,
> especially in labs where netboot is used a lot.

We have a G5 server netbooting two labs across subnets.  Not afraid of 
Appletalk :-)

> Older Novell clients (using IP) did the same thing...portfast worked
> like a charm.

We have legacy Novell over IPX, and new Netware Client32 over IP.  No 
problems there either.

Which leaves me with the question, what can this application possibly be

doing Appletalk-ish that wouldn't work on a plain old layer2 2924XL? 
And note that their recommended "solution" is to use a non-managed 
switch (they did not say "hub" which I might have bought into being 
somehow different).

Jeff
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