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Chapter 3: Cabling the Network Ports
48
Cabling the Switch
Observe the following guidelines when connecting a twisted pair or fiber
optic cables to ports on the switch:
The connector on the cable should fit snugly into the port on the
switch. The tab on the connector should lock the connector into place.
The twisted pair ports on the switch are auto-MDI/MDI-X. As a result,
any type of network device can be connected to a port on the switch
using a straight-through twisted pair cable. If you disable Auto-
Negotiation on the port, the port defaults to MDI-X.
If your network topology contains a loop where two or more network
devices can communicate with each other over more than one network
path, do not connect the network cables forming the loop until you
have activated a Spanning Tree Protocol on the switch. Data loops can
adversely affect network performance.
For a port to successfully Auto-Negotiate its duplex mode with an end
node, the end node should also be using Auto-Negotiation. Otherwise,
a duplex mode mismatch can occur. A port using Auto-Negotiation
defaults to half-duplex if it detects that the end node is not using Auto-
Negotiation. This can result in a mismatch if the end node is operating
at a fixed duplex mode of full-duplex.
To avoid this problem, disable Auto-Negotiation on a port and set the
port’s speed and duplex mode manually if the end node has a fixed
duplex mode of full-duplex.