Subject: [netatalk-admins] Spanning Tree and Netatalk

From: Lewis Pennock <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 99 11:29:06 -0600

Does the Spanning Tree and AppleTalk problem discussed in the TIL article 
below affect Netatalk?

<http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n30922>

Whenever I start up Netatalk on one RedHat machine the switch and hub 
traffic lights shoot through the roof, and the everything AppleTalk 
related slows down to a crawl across the board.  I have to shut down the 
daemon to get things back to normal.  I am leaving the atalkd.conf file 
blank with just the eth0 interface, and it correctly looks like this 
after I start it up:

eth0 -phase 2 -net 200-209 -addr 205.221 -zone "Hammock"   

This problem didn't start happening until I upgraded to a Cisco Catalyst 
switch and put a 10/100 card in the Linux box.  I have just disabled 
Spanning Tree to fix all our G3s which were acting up (see the TIL 
article), and tonight I will start testing Netatalk again, but if anyone 
can tell me whether or not the Spanning Tree problem even affects 
Netatalk at all in the first place it might save me some time.  I guess 
what I'm asking is, "Is it a protocol wide problem or just a MacOS 
implementation problem?"  Thanks!

-Lewis

--
Lewis Pennock
[email-masked]
http://www.lewis.net

---

From: Robert Beer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 13:14:18 -0500

>implementation problem?"  Thanks!

I would look closely at autonegotiation and force both the switch and NIC to the same settings manually.

---
Bob Beer <[email-masked]>
Ohio Northern University, Academic Computer Services, Ada, OH  45810