Wired Intelligent Edge

Hi Gurus,
I am planning to implement Aruba fault-finder on all access switches containing some older models as well like 2610, 2620, 2650. All of them are configured with loop-protect but we had one case where a downstream switch was blocked by an upstream switch. The downstream switch had loop-protect on all its ports except the uplink ports. What failed was even though the broadcast got stopped at the distribution layer by loop-protect the downstream switch wasnt quick enough to disable the ports.
So in theory if the access switch isnt stopping the broadcasts quick enough the upstream switch will see the broadcast coming and loop-protect will kick in.
The behavior i am after is access switch sees a loop blocks it or breaks it by disabling the ports. It shouldnt be that long that the upstream switch also detects the broadcasts and cuts-off the access switch which brings an outage to the rest of the users on the access switch.

I am a big fan of no-spanning tree so there isnt any spanning tree running. Loop-protect does the job well. I was thinking fault-finder may add in detecting the loop faster before it is detected at an upstream switch. Any guidance will be greatly appreciated.

Rgs
Asidd

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Atif Siddiqui
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Hi Atif,

it seems like you want to achieve all the features of spanning-tree without the hassle of configuring it.

I wouldn't rely on loop protect on connections between switches as it gives you no control over which switch will block its ports when a loop occurs.
This is precisely why you should choose spanning-tree here: Set the STP Priority high on your core and all switches will prioritize their shortest path to the core. Loops between switches will be resolved, but each switch is able to consider its best path to the core.

For Client Ports on Access Switches you could set them as edge ports, so STP will skip the listening/learning state and clients can immediately use the connection.
Now put loop-protect on those client ports and maybe BPDU protection and you are golden.

I would suggest you use RSTP or MSTP as those are very common and easy to set up. MSTP is backward compatible with RSTP.

As I understand it, fault finder is not designed for this

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~s
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