Here's a PIX twist.
The PIX 501 comes with a built-in 4 port 10/100 switch. But a feature missing from the switch is Spanning Tree.
We took two 501s, hooked them back to back and pinged an ip address. Zing! Broadcast storm.
I suppose it doesn't need to have this feature to be called a "switch". It seems rather goofy to not implement STP. Anyone got a guess on this one?
The four-port switch chip is there as a convenience for home users, and *very* small businesses, few of whom encounter issues with topology loops. The capabilities of the switch are exactly the same as those you find on the back of the typical broadband firewall or wireless access point. At no time has Cisco ever advertised it to be a "managed switch".
The PIX 501 is the -only- PIX with a switch. In order to support STP, Cisco would have had to have added code just for that one low-end model, and they would have had to change the CLI and PDM in order to allow the STP parameters to be adjusted and to support disabling the spanning tree per port, and then people would probably expect portfast too. I don't think the typical home / small business user would appreciate turning on their computer and then having to wait one minute before they could use the internet because the PIX was running STP on the off-chance that they had another network device.
Indeed, more than this: in order to support STP they would have had to replace the switch chip with one in which the ports were individually addressible, and they would have had to allocate one MAC per port (STP requires unique MAC per port.)
All of this work would have driven the price of the PIX 501 up noticably, for next to no real benefit. If your network is complex enough to need multiple PIX and complex enough for you to need STP, then it is complex enough for you to drop a managed switch in and to use that instead of the supplied switch-chip.
What you are saying does not make any sense. having two switches daisychained does not imply that you need STP running ! STP is inorder for you to have a loop-free environment, and aslong as you do not connect more than one link between your "2 pix501 back-2-back senario", you are in a loop-free setup.
If you experience what you called a broadcast storm, it must rely on other factors.
The pix501 build-in 4 port switch is a non-managable/transpernt switch. would be pretty "goofy" to implement STP and not per-port speed/duplex capacity settings etc.
rgds Martin Bilgrav
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