Jeff Hardee introduced me to the idea of using longer Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) path length values for high-speed links. I thought this was an intriguing idea and so I started to do some informal ...

Independent spanning trees, often realised as completely independent spanning trees (CISTs), form a foundational concept in network design and routing. They consist of multiple spanning trees ...

Those who had an opinion last week were split evenly: CCNA labs need either 2 or 3 switches, and CCNP labs need either 3 or 4. But why? We saw a few opinions floating around the blog last week, but ...

Joel is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of security, networking and messaging. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @joelsnyder. Building enterprise networks with routers and switches ...