Hubs/switches taking out switches?
- by Bart Silverstrim
Here's the issue...we have a network with a lot of Cisco switches.
Someone plugged in a hub on the network, and then we started seeing "weird" behavior; errors in communication between clients and servers, or network timeouts, dropping network connections, etc. It seemed that somehow that hub (or SOHO switch) was particularly freaking out our Cisco 3700 series switches.
Disconnect that hub or netgear-type SOHO switch and things settled down again.
We're in the process of trying to get a centralized logging server for SNMP and management, etc., to see if we can trap errors or narrow down when someone does this sort of thing without our knowledge because things seem to work, for the most part, without issue, we just get freaky oddball incidents on particular switches that don't seem to have any explanation until we find out someone decided to take matters into their own hands to expand available ports in their room.
Without getting into procedure changes or locking down ports or "in our organization they'd be fired" answers, can someone explain why adding a small switch or hub, not necessarily a SOHO router (even a dumb hub apparently caused the 3700's to freak out) sending DHCP request out, will cause issues? The boss said it's because the Cisco's are getting confused because that rogue hub/switch is bridging multiple MAC's/IP's into one port on the Cisco switches and they just choke on that, but I thought their routing tables should be able to handle multiple machines coming into the port. Anyone see that behavior before and have a clearer explanation of what's happening?
I'd like to know for future troubleshooting and better understanding that just waving my hand and saying "you just can't".
