How to cascade 2 or more 2948G-L3 switches ?

[fareeduddin]

Hi guys !

I was just wondering if it is possible to cascade two (or more) 2948G-L3 switches together so that I get a single switch with 48+48 Fastethernet ports. If yes, can anyone pls tell me how ? Thanks already.

Fareeduddin Ahmad,

Network Engineer, ATS

[msjouw]

The fastest connection you will be able to get on these switches is to put 2 1000BaseT gbic's into them and connect these with straight 8 wire patch leads. Setup a etherchannel on both switches for the GBIC ports and you connected them on a 2Gbps channel. Do make sure that you set the ports for FULL duplex, no portfast, flowcontrol, 1 switch is source and 1switch is destination. Make sure you use the command line to set it up and when the 2948 supports this use the following command on the ports:

port group 1 mode on

Regards, Maarten Sjouw.

[fareeduddin]

Thanks Maarten !

I got that !

Now the thing is that right now I have 2 2948s in one cabinet and each of them has a redundant link to two 4006 ( A and B ) core swiches using 2 GBICs on each.

So to give redundancy to one switch I'm using 2 GBICs (Gigabit ports 49 and 50 )...49 is connected to 4006A and 50 is connected to 4006B ! 4006A and 4006B are connected with uplinks.

So I have 2 2948s in one cabinet but still have to use 4 GBICs to give redundancy to both. What I want to do is to use the minimum number of GBICs while maintaining the redundancy !

How can I do this with the procedure outlined by your suggestion ? I'm sure you have some idea.

Thanks again !

Fareeduddin Ahmad,

Network Engineer, ATS

[msjouw]

Well,

It all depends what you want to achieve. Redundancy can also be achieved on 100Mbit you don't need to use Gbit for that. So you will need to sit down and see where the bulk of your traffic is going and put the gbic's to work there.

Regrads, Maarten.