I replaced some tplink switchesd with insight manageable 24 and 48 port switches (plus sfps). There are 5 vlans across this whole network but when I put the netgears across a particular fibre uplink, after a day or two the port starts to go up and down multiple times per minute then goes hard down - no link light. If I put the tplinks back in it doesn't happen so don't think netowrk topology is issue. I'm thinking storm control and there must be something going on in the network intermittantly to cause the issue to happen. My question is would that intermittant traffic behaviour cause the physical port to go down? As in woudl the port be disabled and therefore show a down event in notifications and no link light on the port?
Thanks.
Update I have found a misconfiguration on the netgear in that some how the native vlan is different on one side of that fibre link. Could this contribute to my issue and per above would the port actually go down anyway?
It would be purely on loop conditions, where STP, RSTP, or ideally MSTP would become active if ports (or correctly spoken links) will be shutdown. Be careful on deploying these, especially with devices from multiple vendors in the play.
I was thinking about it though and stp will put the port into blocking rather than 'down' won't it. And this could be per vlan (well it is in cisco). So for me to physically see no link light on the fibre port what could cause that? Is it only a physical problem?
Thanks for confirming. Are there any scenarios where the switch can disable the port so that the link light goes off or if the link is down does that mean it is definately a physical error?
Normally if by default and you do not have link light on the switch after connecting a device there might be a physical problem and it's subject for replacement. But try troubleshooting further your switch before asking for replacement. I believe when you have port security enabled on any port it could also turn off the link light when violation is met. Would you mind sharing the exact model of your switch?
Apologies, looks like there is no port security via Insight and it's only available on local UI. Since you do not have port security set up and you have ports going up and down I suspect you might be experiencing broadcast storm. A packet capture might help find the culprit and looking at the logs. Do you have ring topology or similar to mesh type of network?
