Hi,
On Sat, Jul 07, 2001 at 12:30:49PM +0100, Ryan O'Connell wrote:
> Network Engineers should be aware of the issues and it's just one of
> the many minor irritations caused by deployment of Spanning Tree. There are
[..]
Is it just me, or is it really time to completely do away with STP?
- STP has no protection against malicious insertion of BPDU packets from
evildoers
- STP has no concept to get decent "routing" of packets in the face of
multiple switches connected over a mesh or a ring structure - packets
always have to travel over the "root path", even if there might be a
direct connection between two switches which just happens to be in STP
block instate.
The main suggestion that has come up in the part is a kind of "L2 SPF"
protocol, where the switches would do with MAC addresses what OSPF does
with IP addresses (+networks) - flood them around, calculate Dijstra, send
packets over the shortest path to their target.
The actual switching process would not even be affected that much - just
the way the CAM table is built has to change.
No more problems with slow STP failover, "portfast" kludges, etc.
gert
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Gert Doering - Munich, Germany gert@greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-35655025 gert.doering@physik.tu-muenchen.de
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