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I've got a situation where I need to connect two switches, a 4507R
(our core switch) to a 3560, using two devices which are functioning
as transparent bridges, connected in parallel. The devices are
actually content filters (they're Lightspeed Rocket appliances if that
makes any difference), and we'd like to have one online as a standby
unit in case the first one fails. The only other thing connected to
the 3560 is two PIX firewalls (active/standby) which are in a vlan
from the core network. The two switch are EIGRP neighbors.

I was hoping that spanning-tree would take care of selecting one
device for production use and the other as a standby. When we tried
it, there was no connectivity at all. It seemed like the switches were
not agreeing on which device to use. Is there any way to maybe have
the 4507R take care of the forwarding/blocking decisions and turn off
spanning-tree on the 3560?

The wise pfisterfarm enlightened me with:
> I've got a situation where I need to connect two switches, a 4507R
> (our core switch) to a 3560, using two devices which are functioning
> as transparent bridges, connected in parallel. The devices are
> actually content filters (they're Lightspeed Rocket appliances if that
> makes any difference), and we'd like to have one online as a standby
> unit in case the first one fails. The only other thing connected to
> the 3560 is two PIX firewalls (active/standby) which are in a vlan
> from the core network. The two switch are EIGRP neighbors.
>
> I was hoping that spanning-tree would take care of selecting one
> device for production use and the other as a standby. When we tried
> it, there was no connectivity at all. It seemed like the switches were
> not agreeing on which device to use. Is there any way to maybe have
> the 4507R take care of the forwarding/blocking decisions and turn off
> spanning-tree on the 3560?

What I've remember from quite a similar setup (but with different boxes,
not sure anymore, Astaro or something like that) is that the boxes
needed to specifically have spanning tree configured, which makes sense
since SPT is a point-to-point thingy.
I would ask your vendor or the producer of this appliance how to
configure that.

Mark

Meanwhile, at the comp.dcom.sys.cisco Job Justification Hearings,
pfisterfarm chose the tried and tested strategy of:

> I've got a situation where I need to connect two switches, a 4507R
> (our core switch) to a 3560, using two devices which are functioning
> as transparent bridges, connected in parallel. The devices are
> actually content filters (they're Lightspeed Rocket appliances if that
> makes any difference)

Do the content filters participate in STP at all? Ie, do they pass STP, do
they block STP and not emit their own, or do they emit their own and not
pass STP?

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