> I have never setup STP but if you were to use a hub you are only > moving the convegence problem to the devices on the end, be it a > router or clients. Instead of a few next hop mac updates between a > switch and the STP bridges , all the devices would need to update thus > increasing total convergence time.
This could be true but I think it depends on the topology and what's trying to be achieved. For instance if you had a simple border network with a pair of bridging firewalls running STP and a hub on either side then the convergence would purely depend on the convergence of STP running on the bridging firewalls - the default timers would put this at 30-50 seconds. Obviously this could break pf state without change to STP or PF options. MAC forwarding tables on the bridges would be updated during the STP learning state. Using dumb switches will introduce delay with forwarding table updates. However if you have intelligent switches that run STP then you can move the failover function to the switches and perhaps take advantage of additional functionality such as Rapid Spanning Tree which might help you close the gap on the speed of a CARP failover. SteveW
