Basic Troubleshooting Tips - HP ProCurve 5400zl Installation And Getting Started Manual

Troubleshooting

Basic Troubleshooting Tips

Basic Troubleshooting Tips
Most problems are caused by the following situations. Check for these items
first when starting your troubleshooting:
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5-2
Faulty or loose cables. Look for loose or obviously faulty connections.
If they appear to be OK, make sure the connections are snug. If that does
not correct the problem, try a different cable.
Non-standard cables. Non-standard and miswired cables may cause
network collisions and other network problems, and can seriously impair
network performance. Use a new correctly-wired cable or compare your
cable to the cable in appendix B, "Cabling and Technology Information"
on page B-1 for pinouts and correct cable wiring. A category 5 cable tester
is a recommended tool for every 100Base-TX and 1000Base-T network
installation.
Improper Network Topologies. It is important to make sure you have
a valid network topology. Common topology faults include excessive
cable length and excessive repeater delays between end nodes. If you have
network problems after recent changes to the network, change back to
the previous topology. If you no longer experience the problems, the new
topology is probably at fault.
In addition, you should make sure that your network topology contains
no data path loops. Between any two end nodes, there should be only
one active cabling path at any time. Data path loops will cause broadcast
storms that will severely impact your network performance.
With your 5400zl switches, if you wish to build redundant paths between
important nodes in your network to provide some fault tolerance, you
should enable Spanning Tree Protocol support on the switch. This
ensures that only one of the redundant paths is active at any time, thus
avoiding data path loops. Spanning Tree can be enabled through the
switch console, the web browser interface, or ProCurve Manager.
The 5400zl switches also support Trunking, which allows multiple
network cables to be used for a single network connection without
causing a data path loop. See the Management and Configuration Guide
for more information on Spanning Tree and on Trunking, which is on the
ProCurve Web site. See page 5-1 for details.