Cisco VG224 and redundant uplinks

Cisco VG224 and redundant uplinks

Customer was asking about the feasibility of using both FastEthernet interfaces on a Cisco VG224 to provide an additional level of reliability / redundancy to analog voice ports.  Given they are not running a dynamic routing protocol internally, I suggested they rely on spanning tree to make the decisions between what uplinks should be used actively, and modify the configurations appropriately.

Here's my before and after snippets...

Before:

interface FastEthernet0/0
 ip address 10.10.10.40 255.255.0.0
 duplex full
 speed 100
!
interface FastEthernet0/1
 no ip address
 shutdown
 duplex auto
 speed auto
!
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 10.10.10.254

After:


interface FastEthernet0/0
 no ip address  (ip address can't be here anymore)
 duplex full
 speed 100
 bridge-group 1
!
interface FastEthernet0/1  (this is normally shut, make sure to no shut)
 no ip address
 duplex auto
 speed auto
 bridge-group 1
!
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 10.10.10.254
!
interface BVI1
 mac-address 0123.0123.0123  (fictitious)
 ip address 10.10.10.40 255.255.0.0  (same IP previously on F0/0)
!
bridge irb  (Integrated Routing and Bridging)
bridge 1 priority 65535  (make as high as possible to reduce possibility of becoming root bridge)
bridge 1 protocol ieee  (this is standard spanning tree protocol)
bridge 1 route ip