Joining MST and PVST Domains

Home Lab, Switching

Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MST) allows network operators to map one or more VLANs to a Spanning Tree Protocol instance. For example, VLANs 1,2,3,4, and 5 can be mapped to STP instance 1 while VLANs 6,7,8,9 and 10 are mapped to STP instance 2. Consolidating multiple VLANs into a single STP instance requires less overhead

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VTP and DTP Interaction

Switching

VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP) and Dynamic Trunking Protocol (DTP) are Cisco proprietary features aimed at reducing administrative burden and ensuring consistency between network devices. VTP is primarily used to propagate VLAN information between switches, allowing an administrator to configure VLANs on a single switch and let them be advertised to the rest of the switch

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VLAN Mismatches and STP

Switching

Lately I’ve been revisiting Ethernet switching and Spanning Tree related topics in much more depth than before. While working through a lab I stumbled upon something I found interesting. I didn’t plan on writing tonight, so I’ll try to make this brief. The focus is the link from SW1 G0/2 to SW2 G0/3. SW1 is

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Spanning Tree BackboneFast

Home Lab, Switching

To close out this 3-part series on Spanning Tree convergence optimizations we’ll be diving into Spanning Tree BackboneFast. This feature allows “classic” STP 802.1D bridges to converge faster when a remote bridge loses connectivity to the root bridge, i.e. this allows faster convergence to indirect link failure. Demo Network To demonstrate convergence with and without

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Spanning Tree Uplink Fast

Switching

In the previous article we looked at the PortFast feature to expedite STP edge port forwarding. The next two articles will focus on STP enabled links connecting switches together. As you guessed by the title, this one is about a feature called Uplink Fast. What problem are we solving with this feature? Consider the topology

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Spanning-Tree PortFast

Switching

Imagine the scenario: It’s Monday morning and you’re running a few minutes late getting into the office. You have an important meeting starting as you’re taking out your laptop, and letting it boot up while you plug in the charger and that cruddy old network cable coming out of the floor. As the network cable

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STP Bridge Priority 4096

Switching

Have you ever wondered why per-VLAN spanning tree only accepts bridge priority values in increments of 4096? I have. I spun up a lab and Wireshark to figure it out. In Cisco IOS, if you attempt to configure a bridge priority value that is not an increment of 4096 the CLI will print a helpful

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STP Priority

Home Lab, Switching

When learning protocols, I like to build out a lab, take packet captures, debugs, and show commands and try to understand and justify the output. My most recent exercise is with PVST+. I built out the 6-switch topology below in CML. One of the first things I experimented with is bridge priority configuration. VLAN 10

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