There is another way you can configure it, so that none of the ports are in a blocking state. This would be achieved by configuring the ports as an etherchannel pair so it appears as a single logical link.Any outages between the two switches will not...

The marking will occur on the 6500 regardless. The trust state only needs if you need the values kept for the ingress into the switch/router.You need to trust the state on the router otherwise it will set it to default.

When you look from the router initiating the packets does it only have one route in the routing table via the serial T1 to the destination address?

Depending on the your requirements i.e. whether you need to originate connections from outside to inside or visa versa depends on how you can configure NAT and another consideration is the version of code you have deployed.If your connections are ori...

Jim on the 2950 have you configured what the native vlan should be?For dot1q you should specify what the native vlan is otherwise it will not bring up the other vlans assigned on the trunk.