how do you daisy chain switches

[mewtont]

When daisy chaining do the connecting ports have to be trunk connections?

 

[train_wreck]

idk what a "trunk" connection is.... you might mean to say that they are "uplink" or crossover ports. connecting 2 switches normally needs either a crossover cable or a physical port on 1 of the switches that is crossed over internally; the exception is if 1 or both switches support MDI-X, which is automatic crossover that does not require any special cabling or hardware. all gigabit switches have this, and some 100mbit ones do. i'd recommend plugging a normal ethernet between them and see if you can get any data transfer; odds are you can if your switches are relatively modern.

 

[MartinWilson]

When daisy chaining do the connecting ports have to be trunk connections?

It depends. A 'trunk' port is a port that allows 2 or more vlans to traverse the port.

If you have connected two switches together and only one vlan is used, then no is the answer.
If you use more than one vlan and those vlans are used on both switches, then yes, you do need 'trunk' connections.

 

[mewtont]

Thanks Martin, it will be using multiple vlans, sadly this means the switch isn't working as it wont allow traffic using either trunk or access ports. I was hoping that I was missing something

 

[choucove]

The naming conventions between switches can often get mixed up, but trunking is generally the term used by Cisco for a single connection which is allowing through multiple VLANs between two devices. Trunking has to be set up on both switches for that port (or ports) along with configuring which VLANs will be allowed through that trunk. If memory serves me the most common method of this was dotq tagging.

And that's what is also used to describe this type of port in a lot of other brand switches including HP. A trunk in an HP server is the name given to a group of link aggregation ports. In HP switches configured for VLANs, a port can either be Tagged or Untagged for a specific VLAN. Untagged ports do not have the VLAN identifier added to the packet frame, so these would be used for connections to endpoint computers (switchport mode access for Cisco). However, when VLAN information has to be passed along with a packet onto another switch or router, it has to be Tagged with the VLAN identifier, meaning it would be a Tagged port (trunk with dotq for that VLAN number in a Cisco switch.)

bill001g please forgive me if I screwed this up and feel free to correct me on my limited Cisco memory!