Chapter 5. Underlying Support

No matter how far up the networking stack you might roam, you’ll always come back down to speeds and feeds—as rule 9 in RFC1925 states, “For all resources, whatever it is, you need more.” But how does the physical layer, with all those bits and bytes and headers and trailers and stuff, relate to network architecture?

The first part of this chapter discusses the crucial questions every network designer needs to be able to answer about every link type (virtual or real), and why each of these questions matters. The second section provides an overview of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) and the points you need to remember to design for STP. The third section covers Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) ...

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