4 ms·

Welcome to the club of STP meltdown survivors! Unfortunately, large L2 Ethernet networks is not scalable and prone to episodic catastrophic failure. You can r

by zyztem 14y ago

Welcome to the club of STP meltdown survivors! Unfortunately, large L2 Ethernet networks is not scalable and prone to episodic catastrophic failure. You can read more here: http://blog.ioshints.info/2012/05/transparent-bridging-aka-l2-switching.html http://blog.ioshints.info/2012/05/transparent-bridging-aka-l... One way to make L2 network somewhat stable is to replace many little switches with one big modular chassis for hundreds ports, like Cat6500/BlackDiamond. Or, to minimize L2 segments and connect between them in L3 (IP routing).

nixgeek 14y ago
Very little of this outage can be attributed to STP issues, and most of the outage seems to be down to a software fault with the switch itself not learning MAC addresses correctly. I'm not sure how having one big chassis switch helps here, since I've experienced many an IOS bug and if anything, putting all your eggs in one big/modular basket just means when the basket breaks all your eggs get smashed.
- drcross 14y ago
  The problem sounds like it was a bug with vender interoperability based on the unidirectional link detection that most people run on fiber based uplinks. Personally I would have went with a homogenous environment with staged deployment. While the server guys seem smart, having a professional network design team commissioned to do the work should have prevented this by labbing it up properly in the first instance. That said, I completely understand outages because projects like these are all a game of calculated risk management.
  - imbriaco 14y ago
    Our goal with this change was not to radically redesign our network in one bite. We are making incremental improvements in our existing environment to solve very specific, ongoing problems. Given the flexibility to completely rearchitect our network you might see different decisions. Stay tuned. :)

by zyztem 14y ago

nixgeek 14y ago

Very little of this outage can be attributed to STP issues, and most of the outage seems to be down to a software fault with the switch itself not learning MAC addresses correctly. I'm not sure how having one big chassis switch helps here, since I've experienced many an IOS bug and if anything, putting all your eggs in one big/modular basket just means when the basket breaks all your eggs get smashed.

drcross 14y ago
The problem sounds like it was a bug with vender interoperability based on the unidirectional link detection that most people run on fiber based uplinks. Personally I would have went with a homogenous environment with staged deployment. While the server guys seem smart, having a professional network design team commissioned to do the work should have prevented this by labbing it up properly in the first instance. That said, I completely understand outages because projects like these are all a game of calculated risk management.
- imbriaco 14y ago
  Our goal with this change was not to radically redesign our network in one bite. We are making incremental improvements in our existing environment to solve very specific, ongoing problems. Given the flexibility to completely rearchitect our network you might see different decisions. Stay tuned. :)