[j-nsp] What is this ethernet switching trace telling us?

[Phil Mayers]

On 06/09/2013 04:59 PM, John Neiberger wrote:

> We have several of these throughout our network and we're only seeing this
> problem in a couple of cases. The rest work just fine. Most of the SBCs are

Obvious question: are you sure those two aren't configured different 
(wrongly) compared to the others, or running different software?

Reading between the lines it sounds like a different group runs these 
devices, and in my experience, kit like this with odd network interface 
capabilities can be misconfigured by staff that don't fully understand 
networking - and it can be exacerbated by vendors using odd terminology 
(e.g. "PHY" used in a non-standard way) and confusing people.

Are you sure they haven't just setup these two devices in active-active 
mode? Or more likely, something that *sounds* like an active-passive 
mode in the UI, to a non-expert, but is really some kind of weird 
active-active spatchcock.

Our storage team did this with a couple of NetApps and the symptoms were 
pretty much identical. It only really brought things crashing down when 
they started sending 1Gbit/sec of performance testing traffic from them...