Gigabit Switch Spanning Tree Causes Slow Logon

Mark Berry February 8, 2010

I recently installed a Dell PowerConnect 2824 switch, my first foray into managed switches and gigabit networking. I blogged earlier about how to set it up and how to use it for bandwidth monitoring.

The client where I installed the switch reported that an XP workstation (a Dell OptiPlex 755 with a gigabit NIC) was extremely slow to log on immediately after a reboot. Like five minutes or more slow. Once the logon did finally complete, I saw that a logon script had failed to map network drives, although I could map them manually. The issue did not seem to happen on older workstations with 10/100 NICs.

Setting Up a Dell PowerConnect 2824 Switch

Mark Berry December 30, 2009

I recently purchased a Dell PowerConnect 2824 switch for use at a client site. The switch has some great features for the price, but the setup instructions are very wrong. I finally gave up and called Dell Support. As soon as the technician saw the 28xx model number, he knew why I was calling; he said about 75% of the calls on these models are due to the incorrect documentation.