On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 20:57:23 +0200 Mark Ruijter <bridge@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > 1. Link state monitoring added. > We discovered the following problem with the existing bridge code. > The code doesn't monitor the link state of the interfaces. When using > two cisco switches with two Linux bridging firewalls the following > problem exists. When the Cisco switch that has the blocking (stp) Linux > bridge attached dies, the Linux bridge no longer receives stp packets > and changes it's state from blocking to forwarding. As soon as the Cisco > switch comes back alive a loop is created in the network for a short but > long enough period of time. :-( > Rather than add another state, it should just go to DISABLED state. > To fix this I added link state monitoring to the code. This is only > active when stp is turned on. When a link fails the bridge port goes to > blocked and then to the new 'nolink' status. The bridge-utils patch > makes it possible to see the status with brctl showstp. > > I did encounter a second problem when writing the link monitoring code. > When you add a vlan interface like eth0.10 then it's not possible to > obtain link state information from this interface. That is a VLAN problem, fix it there. Sorry. > The fix I wrote is that brctl now allows you to specify the interface > that contains the link state. > > Example : brctl addif NUM1 eth0.10 eth0 I prefer to eschew needless complexity. That doesn't mean I won't consider adding it, but let me look at the problem a little more before accepting your solution as is.
