Are you telling me that the GigaSwitch, unlike every other bridge since well before I became involved in networking, is incapable of spanning tree? I find that hard to believe. Could anyone on the list from DEC please confirm or deny this absurdity?
The GIGAswitch/FDDI does spanning tree. As Lance Tatman pointed out, load-balancing only works between circuits joining the same two switches. This would certainly be a factor in planning what kind of wide-area connectivity to use to join two groups of switches. A single 400Mb/s aggregate might perform much better than a pair of 200Mb/s aggregates. Spanning tree plus wide-area connectivity implies that either you send bits farther than they have to go (like from one switch at 55 S. Market to another via Ames), or you have wide area connectivity sitting idle until a spanning tree recalculation decides to use it. I'll check my firmware release notes to see if there are any issues or restrictions regarding load-balancing and spanning tree in the last couple revisions. Stephen - ----- Stephen Stuart stuart@pa.dec.com Network Systems Laboratory Digital Equipment Corporation