A Minor Upgrade: Switch and Battery

See also: managing to mildly destroy a network for 5 minutes while the switch has an anxious breakdown. Unfortunately, my reliable Dell PowerConnect switch has, well… it failed (kinda), and I was looking for an excuse to upgrade switches, so… I did. Admittedly, my impressions of Netgear kit aren’t the highest, but, hey, this switch is actually stupidly good for the price (I paid).

Oh, yeah, I also replaced the UPS since the entire network was offline anyways.

Spanning Tree Protocol(s) Explained

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the BPDUs.

Spanning Tree Protocol, as mentioned previously, is a protocol used by switches to build out a loop-free logical topology of an Ethernet network. The protocol itself is built off of a concept called, well, a spanning tree.

How does this work? Well, that’s what I’m here to explain.