zao

just throwing in my 2 cents... Yes, switches can use STP if it's enabled on them, and that only really needs to be the case if you have a network topology susceptible to routing loops. If you use vlans, the switch could also recognize that it's connected to another switch if you enable vlan trunking on one of the interfaces. Now if we're talking cisco proprietary networks, then they'll be able to use Cisco Discovery Protocol to find directly connected cisco devices and information about them (type/version#/ip/etc). There's more that can be said about the mac address table (which isn't arp), and looking to see if it multiple ip's show up as the same mac address (leading us to assume that those multiple devices are connected by another switch)... ...but now going back and reading boris's original question, if it's something like, "given a pretty barebones network topology with pretty much 2 switches connected to eachother, how do they determine if the <cross-over or straight-through cable> is right for their setup based on the pin connections?" from a couple minutes of looking, it seems that most modern nics use "auto sensing" or "Universal Cable Recognition". I haven't come across an article yet that describes exactly how it works, but my guess is that as soon as a packet goes across the wire for the first time, the NICs on the switches sense which pair of wires were used to transmit and auto-adjust themselves for the correct configuration to listen on those pins and transmit on the others. This link mentions auto-sensing towards the bottom: Ethernet crossover cable ok, n/m, i went back and read again and don't think that was what boris was talking about in the first post....

so we disabled ipv6 and restarted. no probs yet, all seems to be working so far and the tracert times for both our computers are similar. suppose we'll see tomorrow'ish if it keeps up. Thanks for both the replies!

rock on. i hadn't heard of that causing temporary network disconnects before you suggested it. we'll disable it tonight and let you know if/how it worked. :) Thanks for the tip Sparda!

Hey all, hope you're all doin good. So I'm having a prob w/ my g/f's computer. she has a gateway running vista home basic. she's also been having a ton of networking problems. By "networking problems" I mean taking minutes of repeated attempts to connect to a single website (most of the time it just times out), trouble connecting to online services like rhapsody or WoW, and sometimes not even able to ping our home router. it has a wired connection to our router. I also have 3 other computers connected to the router and they don't have any networking problems whatsoever, so i don't think it's the router. Some things I've tried to do to fix it: -replace the ethernet cable with one known to work on my other computers and on different ports on the router, and the problem still persists, so it's not the cable or router port. -i've reloaded the TCP/IP stack with "netsh int ip reset" and restarted the computer. Afterwards it may work fine for a few hours but then it just goes back to crapping out and not connecting to the network. So it seems to me that the problem is local to the box, and maybe a software/driver problem with Vista or Gateway. Has anyone had or heard of any similar issues? Any other recommendations to try to rid it of it's networking rebellion? Thanks for all your help/advice!