5.4. Spanning Tree

There is a flaw in the design of the access to the core network we are building: the access switches all have two connections to the core switches. If the network devices were talking Layer 3, this would be no problem, but of course, the switches are speaking Layer 2. This means that they cannot use dynamic routing protocols to determine the best path. Why is this a problem?

Figure 5.6 shows a typical network scenario in which the user at his workstation needs to get to a server connected to a different switch. Because redundancy has been implemented in the core of the network, the access switch has two paths to get to the core switches. The person at the workstation wants to get to the departmental server, connected to a ...

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