portfast

Only if you have a very strict change control procedure. If you have more than one person who is allowed to reconfigure the cabling without checking it carefully with the other people, then eventually you *will* get unexpected devices connected.

Also, these days servers are increasingly acting as routers, and increasingly supporting VLANs, so unexpected spanning trees are likely to be generated.

Enabling PortFast is always good if the port connected to a server or workstation only. Even the server may act as a router, it is OK to enable PortFast, because a router doesn't participate in STP.

To prevent human errors, you should always label the cable that has enabled PortFast, and enable BPDU Guard on the switch.

Enabling PortFast on access ports also prevents the Switch issuing STP Topology Change Notifications. Excessive TCN's can have an impact on network performance - a TCN is sent every time a port goes up or down unless PortFast is used.

Basically always enable PortFast on user ports.

James

CCIE 15766 wrote:

Yes and as a safeguard enable 'spanning-tree bpduguard'. When a bpdu is received on a bpduguard enabled port it will be shutdown ... err-disabled.

BernieM