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Network Warrior, 2nd Edition
book

Network Warrior, 2nd Edition

by Gary A. Donahue
May 2011
Intermediate to advanced
788 pages
23h 34m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Network Warrior, 2nd Edition

MAC Address Table Instability

Another problem caused by a looped environment is MAC address tables (CAM tables in CatOS) being constantly updated. Take the network in Figure 8-3, for example. With all of the switches interconnected and spanning tree disabled, Switch A will assume the MAC address for the PC directly connected to it is sourced from a different switch. This happens very quickly during a broadcast storm and, in the rare instances when you see this behavior without a broadcast storm, chances are things are about to get very bad very quickly.

MAC address table inconsistencies

Figure 8-3. MAC address table inconsistencies

With this network in place and spanning tree disabled, I searched for the MAC address of the PC on Switch A using the show mac-address-table | include 0030.1904.da60 command. I repeated the command as fast as I could and got the following results:

3550-IOS#sho mac-address-table | include 0030.1904.da60
   1    0030.1904.da60    DYNAMIC     Fa0/10
3550-IOS# sho mac-address-table | include 0030.1904.da60
   1    0030.1904.da60    DYNAMIC     Fa0/10
3550-IOS# sho mac-address-table | include 0030.1904.da60
   1    0030.1904.da60    DYNAMIC     Fa0/2
3550-IOS# sho mac-address-table | include 0030.1904.da60
   1    0030.1904.da60    DYNAMIC     Fa0/3
3550-IOS# sho mac-address-table | include 0030.1904.da60
   1    0030.1904.da60    DYNAMIC     Fa0/2
3550-IOS# sho mac-address-table | include 0030.1904.da60

This switch is directly connected to the device in question, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449307974Errata Page