I have been having an issue with my few brocade devices in the ring not blocking BPDU's properly towards my customers so when they hook a switch up that has spanning-tree on by default, it causes a topology change. Not cool!! :) I have made Brocade aware of the issues, and they are working on a firmware patch to fix the issue, but until then I want to turn off all my spanning-tree so that I don't have random topology changes occur. Until I have verified that the Brocades block BPDU's properly, I will have to manually shut down one of my links completing the ring, and hope that if an actual equipment failure or fiber cut happens that I can still get to that node to turn up the protection link.
Hopefully next year's budget will allow me to upgrade the appropriate equipment so that I can use another ring protection mechanism such as REP, ERP, or MRP. This is just a stop gap until the brocades are fixed or I can upgrade my core network. With all the voice and video I have running, spanning-tree wasn't really doing the trick for me anyway with the long protection times. I just wanted to know if there was an easy way to disable it across my switch-to-switch links without causing any outages; from research, it seems that bpdu-filter, and then portfast-trunk might do it with no hit to the network. I just wanted to see if that was truly the case.. I have tried bpdu-guard with undesired results. I have no idea what to do if the broken link would come back up; but I have to do something about customers equipment causing topology changes all the time, and for now that seems like the best way; this firmware bug in the fastIron code has really put me in a pickle! James Urwiller Lead Internet Services Technician / Network Engineer CCNA 11567125 American Broadband 402-426-6257 - Office 402-278-1875 - Cell 402-426-6273 - Fax [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Miehs [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2012 4:11 PM To: James Urwiller Cc: Pete Templin; [email protected] Subject: Re: [c-nsp] remove spanning-tree without being service effecting Sent from a mobile device On 03/08/2012, at 2:24, "James Urwiller" <[email protected]> wrote: > I got clarification on his suggestion, and I will proceed with that. I > am aware of the risks, the question was how do I mitigate those risks.. > your comment on leaving it alone doesn't help. if you don't have > anything good to say; then don't. Im sure the forum doesn't need your > attitude, I know I don't. Stupid question, why do you actually want to disable spanning tree? How do you plan on setting up redundant links? How will you connect remotely to a switch and enable it when one goes down? What happens when the broken link comes up again suddenly? Andrew _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
