Issue with VLANs on my Nortel BayStack 5510-48T Managed Switch

[egonline]

I bought a Nortel BayStack 5510-48T managed gigabit switch from a local guy for $30 and, for the featureset and an original price tag of $7,000, that is quite a deal. After interfacing via serial and assigning an IP and bringing it up on the network, I logged in and was blown away by all the options and features this thing has. It has a CLI interface similar to Cisco as well. It's all powered by an Avaya firmware apparently. In spite of all that, really all I need it to do is to partition port groups into VLANs. And that's where my problem lies.

I created three different VLANs - one, for ports 1-12, labeled "WAN-1" which is connected to my Cisco router and thus my BGP session and Internet connectivity/drop; ports 13-24 as WAN-2 which is another gigabit Internet drop; and ports 25-46 as LAN, which is for the local network.

I plugged my Netgear Prosafe Gigabit VPN/firewall device (functioning solely as a VPN server, and as a gateway for a few LAN-only servers) into port 45 and the second Internet drop (DROP-2) into port 46 - the "LAN" VLAN. For whatever reason the Netgear was unable to use the connection provided by it. Out of curiosity I plugged it into ports 1 and 2 respectively and it worked fine. I tried ports 13 & 14 (in WAN2) and I got the same deal - it didn't work. It seemed to only properly VLAN (as a separate network, which is my goal with the VLANing) on the ports 1-12 which is the first VLAN.

I noticed in the VLAN configuration on the switches web interface that only the first VLAN (WAN-1) had a MAC address associated with it. The other two (WAN-2 and LAN) did not. I'm not sure what the MAC address is supposed to represent in this case, but could that be the reason that the VLANs without a MAC associated are not working properly? It would seem that devices plugged into those VLANs are unable to communicate properly with one another.

Again, the first VLAN works fine and devices plugged into it can talk to one another just fine. It's the additional VLANs that do not work correctly. My old managed switch (a 24-port 3COM 100mbit) worked fine with VLAN segmenting in the exact same setup I tried to do with the Nortel BayStack.

Any idea as to why the additionally created VLANs are not working properly and devices in them are unable to talk? I want to say that maybe my laptop, when plugged into a port in the same VLAN as my Netgear (the "LAN" VLAN) was able to talk to the Netgear but the Netgear was not able to send data over the connectivity provided by the drop (DROP-2) that I plugged in. So really it's kind of working, but not entirely, as not everything can talk together.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks
Brandon

 

[L&LD]

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/153640-nortel-baystack-vlan-config

At 135W (insanity!) for just the switch and being at least a dozen years old, I don't know how much of a deal that is?

How many devices do you have connected to this switch? A more modern option with up to date firmware may be the better way to go?

 

[coxhaus]

You need to make sure the VLAN is defined the same on both switches like 802.1q. I think the reason for the MAC on the first VLAN is that it is the management VLAN. Nortel was high switches a long time ago. They do burn excessive power and generate lots of heat. I would think they are real noisy also.
The switch could have some burned out ports. I would put all the ports in the same VLAN which is working and test all the ports one at a time to see which ones work and which ones don't.

 

[System Error Message]

:O a Nortel Baystack, those are usually good and i havent seen those around for quite a while.

That 135W is actually the maximum. If you stuck a wattmeter in it will be a lot lower than that and assuming it doesnt use POE since 48 ports of ethernet can actually use a lot of power (this was last time). The chip itself would also be bigger not only for being managed but in order to handle all that bandwidth which was more difficult last time. Usually for larger switches you have the switch chip itself connected to a bank of chips that handle a few ports each. If it was a decade old the manufacturing process would be much bigger so such a chip with many IOs would have to pull a lot more power just to handle all that burden (Nvidia's GTx 280 is an example of this with their 512bit memory bus).