portfast on dell 5324 vs. cisco

hello,

i am having a heck of a time getting a dell 5324 switch to dhcp directly
to a couple linux boxes i have hung off it.

in the past i have used cisco, and i remember they have a setting
"portfast" which i beleive disables attempts to create a spanning tree
on the ports where this is set.

well, i am seeing the same problem with this dell. often when the
networking comes up it gives RPC errors or "check cable" message, and
the links lights stay off for ages. once it does come up, it is somewhat
reliable until the next reboot (but not always). often dhcp just times
out and the link lights stay off.

enabling portfast on the cisco instantly fixed this problem, so i was
suprised to see no change on the dell 5324. it's like i changed nothing
at all.

does anyone know of another setting i can change on the dell 5324 to
help with this negotiation/dhcp/spanning-tree problem when i have linux
boxes connected directly to the switch?

Thanks,
flash.

Flash wrote:
> hello,
>
> i am having a heck of a time getting a dell 5324 switch to dhcp directly
> to a couple linux boxes i have hung off it.
>
> enabling portfast on the cisco instantly fixed this problem, so i was
> suprised to see no change on the dell 5324. it's like i changed nothing
> at all.
>
> does anyone know of another setting i can change on the dell 5324 to
> help with this negotiation/dhcp/spanning-tree problem when i have linux
> boxes connected directly to the switch?
>

if anyone cares, there is a timeout in the linux network scripts of 5
seconds for a link to come up, from what i can see. this dell switch
takes between 1-7 (sometimes more) seconds to brink the link up no
matter what we do.

the more machines plugged in, the worse it is. none of our ciscos do this.

disabling STP on the ports got rid of the larger problem, where it would
hang for a minute or more, but not this final issue. for now we have
upped the timeout to 15 seconds.

thx,
flash