Power Mac G5 Cisco 3500/3550 Switches

Hi Everyone,

I am at a lost here....we have run Mac OS 10.3.9 for about 2-3 years without any issues and upgraded to 10.4.6 in March of this year when it was released.

I didn't notice any issues and no students or faculty complained of any problems and then we had a week break where all the computers and servers for the Macs were reimaged with 10.4.7 in July. All of our 1500 PC's have been reimaged as well.

We have three different models of Macs running PowerMac G5's, iSight iMacs, and older 867mhz Quicksilvers. All connected by CAT5, 100MB to cisco switches which are Catalyst 3500 and 3550 switches with a backbone to our server room on Fiber.

I am being told that nothing on the network has changed in months, but our G5's are suddenly having issues not taking MCX settings from our OS X server. For Windows admins MCX would equal GPO settings not taking on the clients.

Its only affecting the G5 hardware which is very weird! I have went as far to revert our server and come clients back to where we were when we moved to 10.4.6 where I thought everything was running fine and still had the issue. I went as far to flat load a client and still have the issue. But if I move back to 10.3.9 everything is fine.

I can't believe that the issue we are having has been going on since we moved to 10.4 in March....I would have noticed it and someone would have reported the issue by now. Students and Faculty are saying it started in after the break.

Other macs are working fine it just seems tied to the G5 hardware only when they are on our network. If I setup a Mac network on its own with a server and a G5 client things work fine.

I don't take care of our switches we have a network person that does that and he says nothing has changed but I just can't believe that, something had to change over the break. I upgraded alot on my side with the macs but reverted back and still had the issue so its something else and only happens when the G5's are on our network.

Has anyone heard of or know of any issues with Cisco switches and G5 hardware? I seen another thread and the fix was to ground the switches which makes absolutely no sense!

Any ideas? I am going to try and turn off spanning tree on one port and see if that does anything and maybe will try and force full duplex instead of auto negotiate but I'm not sure what else I could try. I am trying to get help from our network admin but thats been a chore in itself.

Sorry for the long post....just very frusterated....usually don't have issues with Macs and this is a strange one to troubleshoot. I have tried everything on the software side of things.

We have about 122 G5's not working correctly and have another 100 Macs that are working fine, ones having the issues are only G5 hardware running 10.4.x on our network.

Thanks,

Dan