A customer is having problems with MAC clients since upgrading them to MAC OS 10.3.7.
The following are pertinent details/conditions that help paint the picture of the problem:
Apple EMAC workstations running IP and Appletalk.
MAC OS 10.3.7
Connected to a stack of 3524XL in line power switches. These switches are running 12.0(5)WC10.
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Scenario 1:
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The 3500 access switch ports are configured for voice:
* 802.1q trunks
* encap 802.1q
* spanning-tree portfast
* native vlan and voice vlan assigned appropriately
* Switchport priority extend cos 0
If the MAC clients are started up simultaneously, or even close to it, they will fail to fully boot. They act as if Appletalk didn't initialize before the OS continued to boot, leaving dependant services hanging. This behavior is very similar to not having portfast enabled on an port.
If a MAC is started by itself, it will boot with no issues, almost every time.
I noticed that the CPU utilization goes up considerably when booting all stations at once (6 of them) in this situation as well... STP Hello is the process that appears to increase in utilization. The console is quite laggy at this time.
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Scenario 2:
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Switch ports set as access ports only.
Spanning tree portfast enabled.
Clients boot up with no issues at all.
Client has tried turning off spanning tree for the data vlan and the clients boot normally. I don't like that as a solution, for obvious reasons.
Also- The CPU utilization always stays at about 45-50% under normal network conditions.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!
Thanks,
Tim Moffett
Ronco Communications
