swtch 2900 doesn't flood traffic

[gdspa]

We have a 2900 switch connected to a 2950.

We connected some printers to the 2900.

When I try to ping a printer when I don't have mac address in my arp table, there are not problems.

When I ping after 1 or 2 minutes, when my pc has mac address in the arp table but mac address is not in

the mac address table of 2900, I can't ping printer anymore.

It seems 2900 doesn't flood packets when it doesn't know the port of the printer: with a capture I saw that

icmp packet arrives on the port which connects 2900 to 2950 but it doesn't arrive on port of the printer.

Can anyone help me to understand the issue?

Thanks!

[Jose Martin Villanueva Mauricio]

Hi:

In my opinion, it is very dificult to find out why the switch doesnt flood the traffic when it doesn't have the destination MAC Address in its CAM table. But you could do a little trick, you could configure the MAC address with the follwing command:

Switch(config)#mac-address-table static <mac-address-of-the-printer> vlan <vlan-of the-printer> interface

With this configuration the 2900 switch will never have the de necesity of flood the traffic when a frame is destinated to the printer because the switch will always know the MAC Address of the printer and the port.

[gdspa]

Hi Jose,

thank you for your suggestion, we have already applied it and now we have not problems.

I ask because we have other old 2900 switches and we would like to use them to connect for example

printers.

I will try with another 2900 switch and give a feedback.