Independent spanning trees, often realised as completely independent spanning trees (CISTs), form a foundational concept in network design and routing. They consist of multiple spanning trees ...

Jeff Hardee introduced me to the idea of using longer Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) path length values for high-speed links. I thought this was an intriguing idea and so I started to do some informal ...

Those who had an opinion last week were split evenly: CCNA labs need either 2 or 3 switches, and CCNP labs need either 3 or 4. But why? We saw a few opinions floating around the blog last week, but ...

Joel is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of security, networking and messaging. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @joelsnyder. Building enterprise networks with routers and switches ...