Spanning Tree

Sure, why not? Nothing stops an unsuspecting user from plugging a cable from port to port just to see what happens.
 
Agreed, I'm just trying to think of any repercussions that might be involved if I start turning it on one switch at at time (I have 13 switches in the building).
 
JayAre said:
Agreed, I'm just trying to think of any repercussions that might be involved if I start turning it on one switch at at time (I have 13 switches in the building).
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It takes a lot longer for the port to become live and start passing traffic.

We ran into a problem with some newer model optiplexes (well, now a few years old) where the connection would flap when the networking driver initialized (prior to this it was just at power on/post). It could take 30+ seconds for our switch to start forwarding traffic. By this point it was after the machine had booted up and machine group policies timed out. After an extended period of time without updating machine policies, software distributed via machine gp began uninstalling.
 
You may want to wait until after business hours to turn on spanning tree. When you turn it on, all ports will probably reinitialize to the blocking state before going through the llistening-learning-forwarding states so you may have about 45 seconds of downtime while spanning tree converges.
 
If you do turn on spanning tree, (assuming Cisco switches) remember that 'spanning-tree portfast' is your friend (it will make the port come up in about a second, rather than 45 seconds)
 
Fint said:
If you do turn on spanning tree, (assuming Cisco switches) remember that 'spanning-tree portfast' is your friend (it will make the port come up in about a second, rather than 45 seconds)
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They're HP switches, but I did read that about spanning-tree portfast last night. Thanks for the replies guys. It's much appreciated.
 
portfast (or fast-start) on all client/edge/server ports except uplinks (and trunked links)

or just go nortel SMLT and not have to worry about STP from the start on your uplinks.
 
Yes spanning tree is a good thing. It only takes 1 genius that thinks hooking 2 ports from the wall into their $30 linksys switch will get them double the bandwidth to kill a network. But you do want Portfast (Fast-start), or you may start getting "A domain controler could not be found" messages on desktops from time to time.
 
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