Hello, I've got a very strange problem. Lately I've been setting up my linux servers for network (layer2) redundancy with a bridge interface containing two ethernet interfaces connecting to two switches. So far I didn't have any problems with it, but now a very strange thing happens with a new server I'm installing. The server is an ibm x346 having two onboard BCM5721 cards, the switches are cisco 3550, and I've tested with kernel versions 2.6.10 and 2.4.28. The bpdu's from the cisco switches simply cannot be seen on the server, causing loops in l2 traffic. I've tested with sticking a hub between the c3550 and the server, the switch sends out the bpdu's, but they are not seen by linux (running tethereal). This happens only on eth0, on eth1 everything seems fine. Any IP traffic on eth0 goes through, no packet loss, no errors. And something even more strange: if I do an ifconfig eth0 0 up; brctl addif br0 eth0; it seems to be working fine, if I do it the other way round, then the bpdu's sent by the switches are lost somewhere. Considering all these, the problem seems to me a strange interaction between the bridge driver, the tg3 driver and the hardware in question. Any ideas? Greg - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
