Switching/Trunking

[rboklewski]

Question,

Looking to setup a couple of vlans and have a question about trunking.  To make it easy, the situation is as follows.  We have 3 switches (2960s) that will be trunked together and the top switch will be trunked to an ISA 570.  Now, the top switch is a single point of failure, which we cannot have.  Is there a way to connect one of the other switches to the ISA so if the top switch goes down and breaks the trunk link we have a backup?

[Gregory Snipes]

Sure, just connect up the two trunks to the programmable ports, Spanning tree will detect and kill the extra link, it will not pass any traffic unless the "top" switch goes down. You should set the "top" switch as the spanning tree root when you do this.