adrift on a cosmic ocean

Writings on various topics (mostly technical) from Oliver Hookins and Angela Collins. We currently reside in Sydney after almost a decade in Berlin, have three kids, and have far too little time to really justify having a blog.

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Posts tagged with spanning tree

  • Dangers of spanning tree interoperation
    Posted by Oliver on the 12th of September, 2010 in category Tech

    A couple of months ago we ran into a minor issue at work when running Cisco and HP switches together. Naturally we have redundant links in place for all networking equipment so spanning tree of some sort must be used. In theory, any equipment can work together with spanning tree but the reality is not exactly this utopian:

    • Cisco supports natively their proprietary protocols PVST, PVST+, PVRST and PVRST+. They also support MSTP, and all modes will drop down to compatibility modes of STP after detecting standard STP peers on the line.
    • HP supports MSTP, RSTP and STP. Will drop down to RSTP or STP after detecting peers who use those protocols on the line.
      • …
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