Saturday, January 21, 2012

BPDU filter and BPDU guard combined

Lets recap what do they do

1. BPDU filter, if it is configured at port level in that case it stops sending bpdus out and if any bpdus is received it silently discard them. But if it is globally configured with portfast then in that case it stops sending bpdus but when it receives any bpdus the portfast enable port reverts back to normal port.

2. BPDU guard, if is is configured interface level, it does not stop switch port to send bpdus out but if bpdus are received this port goes into error disable mode and can be recovered via error recovery interval and error recovery cause or manually by shut and un shut that port.
If this feature is used with spanning tree at globally in that case portfast enable port goes into error disable mode if any bpdus are received on this port.
This point is very interesting, if both bpdu filter and bpdu guard are configured on a switch port at the same time the which one take the preference.
The answer is BPDU guard.