Quick Cisco question regrading Spanning Tree...

D-boy

I had a quick Cisco question for you, should you have Spanning Tree enabled on Workstation and Server ports on a 6500 series switch? Should Spanning Tree be disabled on these ports or is it good practice to just use the PortFast Spanning Tree feature instead of disabling Spanning Tree on those ports??? Can you even have Spanning Tree disabled on selected ports? or is it all or nothing?

Reason I ask is we are having alot of workstations getting Microsoft error logs on event ID 5719 - No domain controller available and netlogon errors...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/202840/

Some users home drives drop and sometimes they remap to the share instead of the users home folder

After being connected to "\\servername\users\username" for most of the day they get dropped and rempapped to "\\servername\users" instead...

I believe this is connected to the same issue, we use AD to map home drives.....

and Also some times our bat scripts don't run....

I checked one of the ports on the switch that the user is connected to and it has spanning tree enabled but not portfast..

I don't really have any Cisco experience!

We have been wondering why drives have not been mapping and I finaly looked at event log on the affected pc's and it points to a problem with the switches...


D-boy

Thanks,
Daniel

Humper

Well this really belongs in a cisco forum dont you think?


Spanning tree cannot be enabled on the workstation itself as far as I have heard. I believe it is bad practice to enable spanning tree portfast on a switchport which connects to a server due to some servers having failover switchports. You cannot disable spanning tree on a switchport, you have to disable it on the entire switch which is a very very bad idea. Spanning tree portfast can be enabled on a switchport with only one host connected to it (with one nic). This doesnt not disable spanning tree, what it does is moves the port state from blocking to forwarding instantly by passing the Listening and Learning states, from what I can remember if it detects a loop it will put the port in "inconsistent port state" dont quote me on that though I have to double check my books.