Tag Archives: STP

CCNP SWITCH Lab show commands

Second post of this little series. While I was using my CCNP SWITCH lab for testing many different protocols, I “showed” and saved the output of those protocols as well. Refer to the lab overview of my last post in order to understand those outputs.

I basically saved them as a reference for myself in case I am interested in the information revealed by them. I won’t explain any details of the protocols nor the outputs here. Just many listings. Fly over them and reflect yourself whether you would understand anything. ;) Here we go:

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Wireshark Layer 2-3 pcap Analysis w/ Challenges (CCNP SWITCH)

While preparing for my CCNP SWITCH exam I built a laboratory with 4 switches, 3 routers and 2 workstations in order to test almost all layer 2/3 protocols that are related to network management traffic. And because “PCAP or it didn’t happen” I captured 22 of these protocols to further investigate them with Wireshark. Oh oh, I remember the good old times where I merely used unmanaged layer 2 switches. ;)

In this blogpost I am publishing the captured pcap file with all of these 22 protocols. I am further listing 46 CHALLENGES as an exercise for the reader. Feel free to download the pcap and to test your protocol skills with Wireshark! Use the comment section below for posting your answers.

Of course I am running my lab fully dual-stacked, i.e., with IPv6 and legacy IP. On some switches the SDM template must be changed to be IPv6 capable such as sdm prefer dual-ipv4-and-ipv6 default .

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Layer 2 Redundancy with STP: Palo Alto Firewall + Cisco Switches

I built a basic test laboratory with a Palo Alto Networks PA-200 firewall and two Cisco Catalyst 2950 switches in order to test the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) for achieving Layer 2 redundancy for the physical connections to/from the firewall. This post lists the configurations, “show spanning-tree” outputs from the switches and a few other outputs after several tests. Not all tests ran without any problems so I think there must be something wrong with my configurations, the test sequences, with the STP process, or with the MAC address tables. Maybe some readers have similar experiences?

[UPDATE] Problem solved! I missed the layer 2 zones. Description at the bottom. [/UPDATE]

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