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Jeff swicegood

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Why do I have to move a cable from one port to another on my managed switch?

I am trying to get my network to be stable for long periods of time. Every once-in-a-while, usually after I have made some configuration change elsewhere in the network, one or other of the ports on the switch become unresponsive so that the device connected to it cannot get an IP address. The problem is then solved by moving the Ethernet cable to a different port. This never happened with a dumb switch. Do these ports have some kind of "memory" that gets messed up?


Setup:
TP-Link  TL-SG3216 managed switch
various other devices and PC's
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John
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Port memory would seem unusual in any switch.

1. Is this one switch? Or does it happen to more than one?
2. Can you reset the switch to factory setup?  Does that help?

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Jeff swicegood

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1. Yes, I only have one managed switch. And it only happens on that one.
2. Yes I did reset the switch. That was Tuesday. I haven't had a problem since then. Maybe that cleared everything out. I thought maybe ports over time become associated with particular mac addresses and when something goes wrong with that they stop transmitting.
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@Jagadguru - Thank you, and I was happy to help. I wish you good luck with your Switch.

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The ARP table is a kind of "port memory".
But it would be unusual for it to cause problems unless:

If you have say 2 devices with the same IP address and one is normally powered up and the other is normally powered down.  This might be done to provide a backup device.

- THEN you try out the backup and switch the power on both.

This introduces a new MAC address for the same IP address.
Sometimes it clears up rapidly and sometimes not.
So, sometimes it will appear that things aren't working; at least for a whiel.
Thanks! I think that is what is happening.  Sometimes I plug in a new device that is identical to one I have on the network, not knowing that they both have the same IP (the default one). I guess it takes some time for the switch to recover from that.