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Troubleshooting Traditional Mode Bridges - VLANs

This article presents troubleshooting procedures for bridges in traditional mode.

Bridge Is not Passing Traffic

Symptoms

  • The bridge looks correct (correct ports are in the bridge, and the swps are admin up, physically up),
  • But traffic is not passing through the bridge.

Solution

brctl does not show if the bridge is administratively down:

cumulus@switch:~ $ brctl show br-untagged
bridge name bridge id       STP enabled interfaces
bridge      8000.443839003424   no      swp20
                                    swp22
                                    swp23

This bridge looks fine, but is admin down:

cumulus@switch:~$ ip link show br-untagged
63: bridge-untagged: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN mode DEFAULT
    link/ether 44:38:39:00:34:24 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Bridge Is not Giving Spanning Tree Output

Symptoms

  • Bridge is up and passing traffic,
  • But mstpctl is not giving any output on the bridge.

Solution

No output means that spanning tree is not enabled for that specific bridge.

Example output:

cumulus@switch:~$ mstpctl showbridge br-untagged
cumulus@switch:~$

Add bridge-stp on under the bridge stanza and ifup the bridge. Output now appears when mstpctl showbridge command is used:

cumulus@switch:~$ mstpctl showbridge br-untagged
bridge CIST info
  enabled         yes
  bridge id       8.000.44:38:39:00:34:24
  designated root 8.000.44:38:39:00:34:24
  regional root   8.000.44:38:39:00:34:24

Individual Port Is not Forwarding Traffic despite Being up/up

Symptoms

  • brctl output looks fine,
  • swp is showing up/up,
  • But the swp does not forward traffic.

Solution

Check if spanning tree has disabled ports by using the mstpctl showport command:

cumulus@sw2:~$ mstpctl showport br-untagged
*  swp17 8.003 down 8.000.44:38:39:00:25:E8 8.000.44:38:39:00:25:E8 0.000 Disa
*  swp18 8.001 down 8.000.44:38:39:00:25:E8 8.000.44:38:39:00:25:E8 0.000 Disa
   swp19 8.002 forw 8.000.08:9E:01:CE:DC:D2 8.000.08:9E:01:CE:DC:D2 8.002 Root

In the above example, swp17-19 are connected to the same switch and spanning-tree has disabled 2 of the connections as indicated with the “Disa” at the end of each line. This is correct behavior in this scenario. To get all 3 ports working in tandem at the same time, you could bond the ports together to form an LACP EtherChannel.

You Do not Remember which Port a Device Is Hooked Into

Symptoms

  • Bridge is working correctly,
  • And you have the MAC address of the device.

Solution

Check the MAC address table by using the brctl showmacs command:

cumulus@switch:~$ brctl showmacs br-untagged
port name mac addr      is local?   ageing timer
swp19     08:9e:01:ce:dc:d4 no         8.69
swp17     44:38:39:00:25:e8 yes        0.00
swp18     44:38:39:00:25:e9 yes        0.00
swp19     44:38:39:00:25:ea yes        0.00
cumulus@switch:~$

Now you can see all the MAC addresses (machine specific) and which ports (front panel port) they are tied to. With the above output, only swp19 has a device hooked into it, as indicated by the no under is local?.

You Do not Remember which Port a Device Is Hooked up to, or which Bridge

Symptoms

  • Multiple bridges are configured,
  • And you have the MAC address of the device.

Solution

Use the bridge fdb show command to see multiple bridges and their associated MAC addresses:

cumulus@switch:~$ bridge fdb show
44:38:39:00:25:e8 dev swp17 master br-10 permanent
08:9e:01:ce:dc:c1 dev swp19 master br-20
44:38:39:00:25:eb dev swp20 master br-5 permanent
08:9e:01:ce:dc:d4 dev swp19 master br-20
44:38:39:00:25:e9 dev swp18 master br-5 permanent
44:38:39:00:25:ea dev swp19 master br-20 permanent

See Also