Re: NetworkManager and STP

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 10:24 -0500, Darren Albers wrote:
> I just tried to use NM and a Cisco 2950 switch without portfast
> enabled, this resulted in NetworkManager assigning me a 169.x address.
> 
> When I tried this on a 3550 it went from Blocking to Forwarding a lot
> quicker so NM worked fine and anyone who sets up a switch for user
> access is probably going to enable portfast so this may not be a big
> deal and might only affect a small number of users who probably work
> in a Datacenter and know to just click on NM and have it reconnect to
> the wired.
> 
> I don't know of any way for NM to detect that a switch is going
> through all the STP checks so maybe the ethernet timeout could be
> increased a little?  In this case my switch went from blocking to
> forwarding about 3 seconds after NM gave up and assigned me a 169
> address so it should not need to be much longer...
> 
> On another subject, does NM have a bug database that I should submit
> this to?  I could not find anything so I wasn't sure.

What's the situation here?  NM only cares if the machine's ethernet card
has a link or not, which is reported by the driver for the card itself.
Once the driver reports that it has a link, NM will attempt to acquire a
DHCP address on that port.

Are you saying that the switch takes a long time to actually start
passing traffic from the machine on which NM is running, even though the
port is active?

Dan