This post is more than 5 years old
3 Posts
0
25439
Enabling spanning tree blocks routes to other sites
I recently tried enabling spanning tree on our 6248 switch stack at our co-location. We have a direct connection with a route that goes from our HQ to the colo. When I enabled spanning tree, it completely blocks that route. I can't even ping the gateway. I checked the logs on our Juniper firewalls (where the routing is done) and don't see anything indicating an issue in there...it doesn't even seem to be getting that far. Everything works fine when STP is disabled. Anyone know what could cause this, or where I might be able to start looking. Unfortunately I had to restart the switches to get everything working again (to revert back to before I enabled STP) so the logs seem to be wiped out during the time I had it enabled as well.
The reason I'm trying to enable STP, by the way, is because the switch stack is also connected to a couple of Cisco routers (owned by the colo). They have STP enabled and one of the routers is getting a self-loop error since we don't have STP enabled on our switch stack.
Any help would be appreciated!
bh1633
909 Posts
1
September 15th, 2010 10:00
Cisco switches run PVST by default. PowerConnect switches do not support PVST and they will forward PVST BPDUs (as well as the other Cisco proprietary protocols) as multicast traffic. This is probably the cause of your "self loop" errors.
The whole network needs to run the same STP protocol or the 2 protocols will determine different spanning-trees. Since the Ciscos are probably running PVST and the PowerConnects run STP, this is probably the cause of your blocked route.
laurenmalhoit
3 Posts
0
September 15th, 2010 11:00
Thank you so much!! I will tell them to change it this weekend and try turning on RSTP again! I'll let you know if that fixes it.
laurenmalhoit
3 Posts
0
September 20th, 2010 07:00
We actually just ended up having them turn off STP for now on their side so we can have HA enabled. That seemed to do the trick. Eventually we'll work on getting the correct types of STP enabled everywhere. Thanks for your help!