Dell Powerconnect 5324 issues.

[C7J0yc3]

Hello all,

As this is my first post here after lurking for about a year I have to say its good to have finally joined the discussion.

I recently got a Powerconnect 5324 to replace a 2748 that I was using in my home network. After configuring everything I connected my fileserver running Windows Server 2008 R2 standard with 2x Realtek NICs in a LACP team. I configured ports 3 and 4 on the switch for LACP, and setup a LAG for those two. Everything seemed to work just fine until I attempted to move a 4GB file from my server onto my desktop and noticed that the transfer was going at about 70MB/sec instead of the 110MB/sec I am used to. I unteamed the adapters and disabled the LACP and LAG on the switch, and tried the transfer again. This time it was back to the normal 110MB/sec. I setup the team again, back down to 70MB/sec. I tried on both desktops, and both my laptops which have a mix of realtek, boradcom, intel, and nVidia NICs in them to see if it was a driver issue and all clients returned the same data when trying to pull a group of test files. At this point I am unable to figure out if the issue is the switch or with the NICs as I don't have the old switch to test this out with.

NIC 1: Realtek 8169
NIC 2: Realtek 8168C

I am using the 7.011 drivers on both adapters. To team I am using the Realtek Ethernet Diagnostic utility provided by the manufacture of the motherboard. I also thought it could have been a flow control issue on the switch, so I teamed my desktop (2x realtek NICs on an eVGA X58 SLI board) yet still only about 70MB/sec.

The second issue I have been having is when plugging in a new device it takes about 60 seconds to acquire DHCP from my router (Linksys WRT310N running DD-WRT). It will eventually connect and after that there are no connection issues, I was just wondering if this is standard with a layer 2 switch or did I setup the config wrong somewhere.

 

[Xipher]

On the LACP issue I've never used it with Realtek NICs but I've never been a fan of that brand to begin with.

As for the DHCP issue do you have the switch setup with rapid spanning tree or just normal spanning tree? If it's the later the ports will stay blocking for an extended period before they finally decide that it's not another switch on the port, if that's the case see if you can change it to rapid spanning tree or setup ports in a portfast mode (not sure on Dell uses the same terminology)

 

[C7J0yc3]

As for the DHCP issue do you have the switch setup with rapid spanning tree or just normal spanning tree? If it's the later the ports will stay blocking for an extended period before they finally decide that it's not another switch on the port, if that's the case see if you can change it to rapid spanning tree or setup ports in a portfast mode (not sure on Dell uses the same terminology)

That fixed the DHCP issue. It was set to have all ports as classic STP. I changed all ports that were not going to be used for other switches to be RSTP with a hello time of 2 seconds, and now everything is back to normal on the DHCP front.

As for the others, I just setup a static LAG between my 5324 and my WRT310N to see if this would fix the speed issue, as of now it doesn't look like it, but we shall see.

 

[C7J0yc3]

Turns out that setting up a trunk between switch and router was a bad idea. Even though there is the option it just slowed down the network even more. File transfers slowed to about 30MBps and streaming media started stuttering.