I still have an old P1280 managed switch. Its not had a firmware update in years now.
It seems recently I had issues with Intel network cards and this switch. Specifically one machine. Now I dont know if its a combination of latest Win11 patches, switch or motherboard compatability. But I can only presume its the switch at this point.
I get a ton of event viewer reports ef2fnexpress ID 27 and 32 over and over again. It can happen a few times a day or just sit there with 'network cable disconnected' until a reboot and reseating of cable over and over again. It seems to be quite a common complaint on the internet regarding the i255-v and i266-v cards.
As a bit of background, I have used both an onboard Intel i255-v, a OEM PCIe i266-v and a PCIe X550-T2. They all have the same issues. I have tried setting speed negociations statically...etc on both the NIC and the Switch. Also the only card that allows for Intel firmware flashing was the X550 which has the same issues on the latest firmware. All devices had the latest drivers installed.
However. If I plug any of these cards directly into my Draytek 2900 series router rather than the switch. They are solid as a rock with no problems at all. (The switch is trunked to the router and the router provides DHCP services to many other devices on various VLANs with no issues).
I replaced all the cables from Compute > Socket > Patch > Switch to the same CAT6 type/brand.
Forced X550 to specific speed rather than auto negociate.
Set Jumbo frames on card to match switch.
All seems to be stable now using X550-T2. Guess it was more picky than the switch, even though cable tests were all fine.
