Adding older Switch in New LAN

[bob.mckinley]

Hello all.. I need to add in an older 2950 switch into our production LAN which has 2 3560 switches. Basically we've run out of ports and instead of purchasing a new switch were moving the non critical connections, such as ILO, and DRAC port to the 2900 switch. I have already set the VTP domain status to Transparent and manually added the necessary VLAN to the 2950 switch. I only plan on having one connection to the 2900 switch, so I don’t believe Spanning tree will be an issue. I wanted to see if there was anything else I might be missing.

Thanks,

Bob

[Collin Clark]

Don't forget to give it a management IP and appropriate passwords.

[Reza Sharifi]

As you noted, since there is only one physical connection then there in no STP issue.  Just make sure you know which device is the root bridge in case there is physical loop anywhere in your network

HTH

[Somasundaram Jayaraman]

Hi Bob,

If you have configured the two 3560s to be root and backup root. (lowered the default priority)

Then adding a new switch connected to them should not cause STP to recalculate.

They will simply bring up the new ports. I do think that a TCN might go out and flush mac tables but that shuld be about it.

You might want to check that the new switch does indeed have a higher priority value than the 3560s before you patch it in.

I am not sure which spanning tree protocol you are using but,

RSTP  802.1w is backwards compatible with 802.1d (classic spanning tree) and  will simply put ports towards such switches in a compatibility mode.

Cheers

Somu

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