Hello everyone. I am having a few problems with my networking, please let me explain: I am an IT professional working in a companies IT dept. 3 years ago, the company moved to new premises and had all new Cat 5 cabling put in, running through stacked managed Dell switches. The longer cable runs all have fibre connecting them so no long runs of copper exist. All the networking was put in by a professional company. We have 2x2003 DC's, 2x2008 DC's, Exchange 2007 running on a 2008 server, and a collection of other servers running a mixture from 2000 to 2008 R2 for file servers, Hyper-V etc. We have a DHCP server running on one of the 2K3 DC's, although we mainly use static IP's. Now, if I unplug my network cable from my laptop, and then plug it in again, it takes around 35 seconds for the icon in the system tray to return to the normal "TV and Trident" icon. This is the same whether I am using a static or dynamic address. Moreover, it is the same on every Vista & Windows 7 computer on our network, and we have 60-70 of them. It is also the same on the 2 Macs that we have, although it is worse on the Windows 7 machines (these are the ones now causing me problems) It is the same on boot up as well, which is causing me some issues as mapped drives keep coming up with red crosses on them - which is really not helpful. Not only do I get phone calls, but a lot of our stuff runs from either mapped drives or via UNC connections - for example the company wallpaper is done VIA GPO to display \\server\file\wallpaper.jpg and this sometimes does not happen, so then the user has a black screen, and then they call me. Now, I Know i could create a policy to say "wait for the network to fully load", but I also have laptop users who would not want to wait forever of they are not here, and besides, that is not really fixing the issue, merely covering it up. I feel I must point out that when the network was put in, before we had any of our servers here, the issue was here then as my boss and myself came over and plugged our laptops in to a few ports to ping a dummy server etc and ensure that everything worked. We noticed this delay at the time but put it down to "well, thats obviously how gigabit networks work" as neither of us had any real experience of gigabit networking. So, does anyone out there know how to speed up the connection/detection of gigabit networks on Windows 7/Vista, or is it a case of a 35 second wait is not bad at all and I should stop whining? Many thanks in anticipation

This sounds like your switches are configured to do a complete Spanning-Tree negotiation. That takes around 30 seconds. To disable that on Cisco it's called "Portfast", no idea though how it's called on Dell switches. I'm pretty sure that's your issue. Patrick

Hi Patrick Thanks for that, but unfortunately thats not it. I have another network running alongside this one that uses the same switches etc, but does not exhibit the same delay. In fact, if I connect one of my domain machines to the visitor network, it does not have the problem, only when connected to my domain network. So, with this in mind, I have cleared out the DHCP and DNS caches on my DHCP and DNS servers and restarted them. Nothing doing. So then, I took the rather bold move to all 2008 servers and raised the Domain Functional Level in case the 2003 DNS/DC servers were slowing the process down, and that has made no difference either. So, I am now really out of ideas - and so are Google and Bing. Dont want to have to do the whole support call thing, but I guess I am going to have to if no one can help.

Hi Patrick I owe you an apology. Ever since my last post, I have had a little voice in the back of my niggling at me. This morning it was finally loud enough to hear, and after some more testing, and then a support call to Dell to confirm, you are of course, completely correct. For future reference if anyone has this issue with Dell switches, you can go an extremely long way round this, or just browse to the stack, login and navigate to Switching > Spanning Tree > STP Port Settings and pick a tick in the "Fast Link" box. Many many thanks Patrick. Panther