Published at LXer:

The much anticipated spanning tree edition of Networking 101 has finally arrived. Yes, you too can have a network that survives multiple exploding switches. Read on. The spanning tree protocol was invented by Dr. Radia Perlman, distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems. Dr. Perlman devised a method by which bridges can obtain layer 2 routing utopia: redundant and loop-free operation. Think of spanning tree as a tree that the bridge keeps in memory for the purposes of optimized and fault-tolerant data forwarding.

Read More...