Compaq SW3323, SW3324, SW3322 manual Feature Summaries, Ieee 802.1D Bridge, Spanning Tree Protocol

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Feature Summaries

The following summaries provide a brief description of the switch features in areas such as standards compliance, functionality, performance, and options.

IEEE 802.1D Bridge

The Compaq switch is fully compliant with IEEE 802.1D transparent bridging specifications. An aggregate address table containing 4096 entries per 8 switch ports is provided for learning, filtering, and forwarding. The 24-port switch can support up to a maximum of 12,288 addresses. Addresses are automatically learned by the switch, and can be individually assigned specific forwarding treatment by the network administrator if desired. Forwarding table configuration can be made out-of-band via the console interface or in-band via SNMP or Telnet. Static and dynamic addresses are both stored in this table. One static address is assigned per port by default. The Forwarding Table Configuration screen in the console menus allows you to assign additional static addresses if required.

Spanning Tree Protocol

The switch supports the IEEE 802.1D Spanning Tree Protocol. This protocol allows redundant connections to be created between different LAN segments for purposes of fault tolerance. Two or more physical paths between different segments can be created through the switch, with the Spanning Tree Protocol choosing a single path at any given time and disabling all others. If the chosen path fails for any reason, a disabled alternative is activated, thereby maintaining the connection. This prevents network traffic from circulating in an endless loop formed by multiple connections to the same LAN segment.

The switch is shipped from the factory with Spanning Tree operation disabled. Spanning Tree parameters are configurable in the Spanning Tree Configuration Menu using the console menus or via SNMP (see Appendix B, “Spanning Tree Concepts” for more information).

Compaq SW3322/SW3323/SW3324 Dual-Speed Switch User Guide