I recently “upgraded” to a CSS326-24G-2S+ and found that the switch completely knocks out my network when I connect the existing 3 mesh routers/aps through the switch for wired backhaul (as in there’s no internet connectivity and devices have trouble connecting to the network).
When only one router/ap is connected, all seems fine and when I connect all 3 router/aps to a separate dumb switch and then connect that switch to the CSS326, all seems fine too. I had tried isolating the ports connected to the different router/APs which seemed to work temporarily but eventually it appeared like the backhaul was all wireless and not wired based on the throughput I was seeing.
I’m wondering if anyone has run into a similar issue and if so, how you solved it. It seems silly to have a separate switch just to handle the wired backhaul.
I’m not sure if it’s possible in SwOS, but try to disable STP snd RSTP on all ports connecting mesh system. Mesh will mess with topology (wired interconnects, wireless interconnects, one or both at the same time), possibly in ways which upset STP-enabled network.
I forgot to mention in the original post that I had already tried this (I think) with no difference in the behavior, but thanks for the suggestion – basically the mesh network seems to only use the wireless backhaul when they’re all plugged in to the switch which kind of defeats the purpose and implies to me that the backhaul traffic is somehow dropped in the switch.
And the only explanation that I can come up with is that switch disables all backhaul ports (except one) due to detected loops (an STP feature). Perhaps you have to reboot CSS after disabling STP. If you know your network doesn’t have loops (other than those made by mesh), you can try to disable STP/RSTP on CSS altogether.
For anyone else with a similar issue – I’m not sure why this is in SwOS, but when just applying the RSTP changes, it only shows the connected/active ports as being “disabled” while inactive ports showed the status of “designated” even though RSTP had been disabled for all ports. This still would imply that things should work okay as the connected ports appeared to disable STP/RSTP.
However, after rebooting, all ports, even the unused/disconnected ports indicated that they were “disabled” under the RSTP tab so some internal state appeared to change and I have not experienced any problems since.