If the switch that Orion is connected to goes down, does Orion think everything is down beyond that switch? Thus sending out up/down pages when the switch is back?
Is your Orion Server Dual lan ported? If your network connection goes down to your Orion server the server will not be able to get to the DB (if the DB is on a separate server) and no alerts would be sent. I would say that every node would show node down if you had a console to the server.
I will assume that you were asking what happens with node status Alerts that are configured on nodes that are connected to a switch that goes down. If so, are you wondering what to do with those alerts, since they will not necessarily be truly indicative of the status of the node, you can simply configure the node alert woth a suppression condition tied to the status of the switch. In other words, if the switch itself is down, the connected node status alert will not fire.
Is that what you were after?
Is there a way to just select certain Nodes for alerting?
Yes, you can. If you use a Basic Alert (the simplest kind) , then you can pick from the list of all nodes in your database which one(s) you want the alert to apply to. If you use an Advanced Alert, then there are even more ways to limit the alert to one or more specific nodes.