EtherChannel and Sun/Solaris

Hello everyone,

I'm having some issues with EtherChannel between a Cisco 3550 and a Sun system with a quad port network card (a GigaSwift card) running Trunking 1.3.

On the switch, I setup the ports as follows:

------------------------------------------------------------ configure terminal interface range fa0/11 - 14 switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q switchport mode trunk channel-group 2 mode auto no spanning-tree vlan 1 end

------------------------------------------------------------

This seems to work, however, on the Sun systems I'm getting an error indicating that other systems have my MAC Address. I've gone over my Trunking configuration with Sun, and they feel I have an issue on my switch. Now, I'm a noob with Cisco IOS, so that's not totally out of the realm of the possible.

I used a Cisco guide on setting up Layer-2 EtherChannel and did not have any considerable issues, but since it isn't working quite right, I must have done something wrong.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Steven

Note, as I said, I'm a noice with IOS, so if you need additional information, please provide the command I should run (I'm learning as I go). Thanks.

Output of 'show etherchannel':

------------------------------------------------------------ Cat3550cape>show etherchannel Channel-group listing: -----------------------

Group: 1

---------- Group state = L2 Ports: 4 Maxports = 8 Port-channels: 1 Max Port-channels = 1 Protocol: PAgP

Group: 2

---------- Group state = L2 Ports: 4 Maxports = 8 Port-channels: 1 Max Port-channels = 1 Protocol: PAgP

------------------------------------------------------------ (Yes, there are 2 channels as there are 2 servers configured the same way having the same error)

Output (truncated) of 'show running-config':

------------------------------------------------------------ ... interface Port-channel1 switchport mode dynamic desirable ! interface Port-channel2 switchport mode dynamic desirable ! interface FastEthernet0/1 switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q switchport mode trunk duplex full channel-group 1 mode auto ! interface FastEthernet0/2 switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q switchport mode trunk duplex full channel-group 1 mode auto ! interface FastEthernet0/3 switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q switchport mode trunk duplex full channel-group 1 mode auto ! interface FastEthernet0/4 switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q switchport mode trunk duplex full channel-group 1 mode auto ...

------------------------------------------------------------

Reply to
Steven Faulconer
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You may be confsing EtherChannel with dot1q trunking.

They are completely different concepts.

In any case the trunking commands are applied to the individual interface and not to the channel.

  1. Take out the trunk commands.

  1. Read about PaGP, figure out if the sun wants to (or indeed can) negotiate EtherChannel.

You could try setting the switch EtherChannel to ON.

It's been a while since I did this so I can't help in detail right now.

Also worthwhile might be a debug of PaGP if that is available.

Finally, the issue might just be a few leaked frames. Maybe they don't really matter.

Can you look with tcpdump which I think tells you IIRC whether frames have been sent or received on an interface?

Reply to
anybody43

It's quite possible I'm confusing something. The docs and newsgroups I read indicated that EtherChannel was what I was looking to do, so that's the direction I went in. I'll do some additional reading.

Using the Sun Trunking software, I can see exactly what interfaces are getting packets, and it works as expected (other than the errors I'm getting).

Thanks for the response, I'll have to read a bit more.

Reply to
Steven Faulconer

Some of the confusion may be arising from different terminology being used by various manufacturers.

formatting link
"Sun Trunking 1.3 software allows you to aggregate up to sixteen Sun GigabitEthernet adapter card ports or up to sixteen 10/100 Sun FastEthernet adapter card ports into a single virtual link or trunk."

Cisco call this an EtherChannel. What cisco call a Trunk is completely different. 802.1q is the current trunk technology.

Originally Cisco used their own proprietary protocol to negotiate and manage EtherChannel. PAgP or Port Aggregation Protocol. There is now an IEEE standard for Link Aggregation (802.3ad) which used Link Aggerrgation Control Protocol.

Cisco seem to me to have deliberately blurred the difference in their docs. For example they are both referred to as EtherChannel.

So, you want to use 802.3ad and LACP. I would remove the "Trunking commands" just to tidy up.

configure terminal interface range fa0/11 - 14 no switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q switchport mode access switchport mode access vlan xxx ! Group: 1

Reply to
anybody43

Hi,

I now believe that the Cisco was not in fact aggregating the links at all. The combination of the configured mode (auto) and the lack of PAgP would result in the cisco not bringing up the channel.

Configure as described in the last mail.

Here is one of mine.

sh etherch

displays the configured channel state.

! sh eth det ! - is similar switch2#sh int eth

Reply to
anybody43

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