As I suspected, the customer had disabled spanning tree due to
concerns about the speed of failover. They had also managed to patch a
layer 2 loop into their network during a minor change, causing an
unchecked loop to circulate frames out of control, bringing down their
entire cell site. I explained to them the value of STP, and why any outage caused by it
would be better than the out of control loop they had. I was told to
mind my own business. They didn’t want to enable spanning tree because
it was slow. Yes, I said, but only when there is a loop! And in that
case, a short outage is better than a meltdown. Then I realized the customer and I were in a loop, which I could break by closing the case. Newer technologies (such as SD-Access) obviate the need for STP, but if you’re doing classic Layer 2, please, use it.
Read the article over at SubnetZero
here.
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