6500 series ... not populating mac-address table

Our core switch (6513, SUP720, MSFC3) is not creating all the mac-address table entries it should be. This is causing traffic to be forwarded out other interfaces unnecessarilly.

The 6513 has a vlan interface for that vlan configured with no ip-address but is 'up'. It does create mac-table entries for 'some' hosts in that vlan but not all.

Any ideas where to start looking .. without causing too much 'debug' output.

BernieM

Reply to
BernieM
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What IOS version ?

Reply to
Merv

Version 12.2(18)SXF3

Reply to
BernieM

Do not see any relelvant bugs on CCO.

Can you describe the situation a little further.

Is there any pattern to the ports for which the MAC addresses are missing ? type of module, port position on card, etc, log messages

Post the output of show vlan x, show bridge x

Reply to
Merv

Could this be 'by design'?

The MAC table age time for a VLAN gets set to

15 seconds for some period if a STP enabled port goes up or down unless portfast is configured on that port.

When a VLAN is present on two switches and HSRP is in use it is possible that unicast flooding can occur. This is now well documented on CCO.

The fix is basically to set the ARP timeout to the mac-address table timeout and to eliminate STP TC events by configuring portfast. Search CCO for [hsrp unicast flooding] You will get many hits.

Reply to
anybody43

Thanks for the reply ... but:

1) HSRP isn't configured on the switch not populating the mac-table. 2) It's not a 'timeout', unless it's aging out within 1 sec., as I've pinged from one host to another while on the core switch. No mac-table entry gets added. No mac-timeouts are set anywhere so they're all 5 minutes by default. 3) The ports in question are not bouncing.

Host access port is standard:

switchport switcport access vlan x switchport mode access spanning-tree portfast

I'll add mode detail ... later. I'm sick now and have just spent the last two days in and out of bed.

BernieM

Reply to
BernieM

Are the devices for which the mac-address-table entries are missing directly connected to the 6513 in question ?

Reply to
Merv

Traffic to the MAC addresses that are not in the mac-address-table should be unicast flodded to all ports in the vlan.

To determine the MAC addresses that are being flooded, you can configure

mac-address-table unicast-flood limit vlan alert

Reply to
Merv

Please post output of

show vlan ! for the affected vlan

show spanning-tree

show bridge

show mac-address-table vlan

show module detail

Reply to
Merv

Do you have server connected to that vlan using NIC teaming ?

Reply to
Merv

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