spanning tree ?

I'm on my second cup of coffee (20oz black), compiling kernel 2.6.16-14 for my laptop and reading slashdot. There's an article about the mother of the Internet. I don't know how true that is but she did invent spanning tree.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/050506-sun-radia-perlman-interview.html

She mentions some interesting things about networking and how things evolved. One thing she mentions is DECnet ( before my time) is better then IP. There is also some talk about IT people being inappropriately trained. Too much “do this or that” when IT people should be learning theory. I found it an interesting read.

Here's my question. Should I learn the ins and outs of spanning tree? The reason I ask is because the high school I'm working at has network problems that I think are related to spanning tree. They will setup a game server on one part of the network and only some of the clients can see or access the server.

They are using Cisco catalyst switches. I don't like them because they have way to many options. Most of which are never used.

spanning tree
1.where does this rank among all the other things a network engineer should know
2.how much weight should be given to spanning tree when trouble shooting
3.should it be placed on a check list

Maybe step 6 is “check spanning tree” or something like that.

With all the other things a network engineer needs to know I'm not sure how I'm going to fit this in. There's DHCP, DNS, IP, TCP/IP, routing etc... that I need to know. When will it end.

I'll take the chip implant with IT knowledge pleas.

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Received on Mon May 8 14:02:20 2006