Vlans, Fiber, and RIP

[dbrill001]

What I have currently is two buildings each with a Catalyst which routes traffic to all the different Vlans with RIP. These two buildings are connected through a MAN.

This is what I need to do. I had fiber run and I have the hardware. I need to hook the two buildings up to the faster connection. I have tried to do this already but building number 1's RIP info over wrote the Vlan table of Building number two's RIP info.

Can I just recreate the Vlans from building number two on building number one's catalyst and remove them from building building number two's catalyst then hook up the fiber line and have it all work?

[Jon Marshall · Accepted solution]

If each switch has it's own vlans and IP subnets and you route for all traffic between the switches then make the link a L3 routed link and then you can't possibly overwrite the vlan database.

So use an unused IP subnet with a /30 subnet mask. As you are using network 10.0.0.0 under RIP choose it from this.

Then configure the ports on either end with one of the IPs from that subnet eg.

int <x/y>
no switchport
ip address 10.x.x.x 255.255.255.252

this will work fine as long as you do not need to extend any vlans/IP subnets between your switches.

Does this make sense ?

If it is still unclear please come back for clarification.

Jon