Got a dumb quesiton, We have several WAN links with Century Link and the normal operating procedure is they drop in a layer 2 switch at the WAN site with one at the home office and they pass layer 2 ethernet to us. We throw a vlan on the link with IP's on the virtual interfaces and off we go. no routers, no /30 networks with IP'd interfaces on both sides. Its worked great in the past.
We we brought in some new circuits and they dropped in two switches, both passing layer 2. And they said they need us to fire up both because when we dont they call saying one is down. So one port on each switch going to our layer 2 network, on the other side we plug them into a 6500 VSS. My first thought was that STP should take over an block one link, assume somewhere in the cloud the two switches can see each other. Not the case. Both links fire up and forward and we lose all contact with the far side.
At this point I am tempted to blow the whole thing down and IP one interface on the 65k with one network and the other interface on the other 65k with a seperate network, then IP the WAN side with interfaces and sub interfaces running two networks over the link and let a routing protocol figure it out. I am going to assume that MPLS is at work in the cloud.
I am curious which is the best way to go forward? Right now one link on one 65k is shut, things work, ISP is grumpy and we have no redundancy.
