Planning a Switched Network
2-26
893-878-B
Multiple Switch Operation in a Duplicate MAC Address Environment
Special consideration is necessary when your equipment is operating in an
environment where frames with the same MAC source address can be delivered
to different switch ports in a community. This situation commonly occurs in
networks that use the following devices:
•
Workstations with multiple network interfaces
•
Routers (particularly the routers that support DECnet routing)
•
Bridges (including combination bridge/routers)
In networks with multiple-interface workstations and routers, it is possible, but
not always convenient, to reconfigure the workstation or router to avoid the
duplicate MAC address problems. However, sometimes bridges or
bridge/routers cannot be reconfigured to avoid MAC address problems. In these
bridges or bridge/routers, a bridging function within the device (for example,
a nonroutable protocol) is required to bridge traffic between virtual LANs and
the device cannot be reconfigured to prevent a duplicate MAC address
environment.
Duplicate MAC address environments are not compatible with LattisSpan
trunks. In a duplicate MAC address environment, the switch network must be
configured so that the virtual LANs, where the duplicate MAC addresses are
present, do not span multiple switches in any one community.
When a duplicate MAC address spans multiple switches in a community,
connectivity problems may arise. When a device presents the same MAC
address to two different switch ports, the switch learns the MAC address on two
different virtual LANs associated with two different ports. In this case, the
switch cannot inform its neighbor switches of a unique virtual LAN associated
with that MAC address. The neighbor switches need to know what virtual LAN
the MAC address belongs to in order to properly handle the frames the switch
receives from the MAC address over a LattisSpan trunk link. The problem arises
when the neighbor switches cannot determine the virtual LAN for the frames
that originated from the device associated with the duplicate MAC address.
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Summary of Contents for 58000
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