Host not showing up in ARP table

Question

Hi,
I am having an interesting/weird problem with one of my Catalyst 6509 switches.
The setup is as follows:
HostA - Switch1 - Switch2 - HostB
There is routing in place for HostA to reach HostB and vica versa.
I am testing this using ICMP. There is nothing blocking ICMP traffic on any of the devices.
Problem in question: I can only ping HostB from HostA (or Switch1) if HostB is found in the ARP table of Switch2. Pretty normal you might say since we need Switch2 to route/switch the packet to HostB and that will of course only happen if the ARP table is populated.
But what happens is the following:
I ping from HostA to HostB. It fails. I check Switch2 and I see that HostB is nowhere to be found in its ARP table.
Next I ping HostB from Switch2 (5 packets). First packet fails, last 4 I get a reply. I check and see that now HostB is to be found in the ARP table of Switch2.
Now I ping HostB from HostA and it works fine.
This behaviour is happening for all hosts in the subnet (VLAN) of HostB. I cannot reach them until I ping them from Switch2, after which they're in the ARP table and everything works.
Maybe it something different than the ARP table not being populated all together, but that is for now all I noticed. Does this problem ring a bell with anyone. And is there a fix?
It looks to me like Switch2 is malfunctioning, although I have no idea what is. Furthermore this apears to be working ok for a lot (read: all) of the other VLANS on Switch2.
Anyway. I'd love some help in troubleshooting this one.
kind regards,
Kevin

Answer 1

This goes back to the way switches (or bridges) work. They have to see a frame from an end device to know its MAC address and once they see it they add an entry in their CAM (or MAC) table. The entry basically tells the switch that a specific MAC is reachable via a particular port and this is meant to prevent subsequent flooding of unicast frames. In short an end device needs to send at least one frame for the switch to 'see' it. Another point to remember is that each entry in the CAM table has an age associated with it and if a switch does not see subsequent frames from that host it will age out the entry and start flooding all frames destined to this MAC address until it is learnt again (and learning is done only when the owner of the MAC starts to communicate again).
Kevin,
Can you please explain your topology in a bit more detail? I am looking for information like what is the default gateway of each VLAN, how are the VLANs spread across the two switches, any HSRP configurations and if yes who is the active for what VLAN, routing between switches, etc. This will help us troubleshoot the problem in a more effective manner.