STP port flapping

spanning tree

First of all devices:

  • HP ProCurve Switch 2610-24-PWR

  • Cisco IP Phone 8811

  • PC

I'm receiving loads of logs like these:

I 01/16/17 23:58:39 ports: port 20 is Blocked by STP
I 01/16/17 23:58:39 ports: port 20 is now on-line
I 01/16/17 23:58:54 ports: port 20 is now off-line

These logs are occurring every minute of every hour.

Is this a problem with cable or IP Phone considered as a switch? Or maybe something else?

Thanks in advance.

Best Answer

Make sure you've got your spanning tree set up, so that a central switch is the root. If you don't configure spanning tree priority, a random switch becomes root (the one with the lowest MAC address) - if that's a phone switch or any other 'peripheral' switch you're bound to have unexpected reconvergences.

We've set our core switch to priority 4 (16384) and the other central switches to 6 (24576). The priority of the edge switches stays at 8 (32768), so they won't ever become root.

Additionally, you might want to protect the root ports on the edge switches so that no rogue switch can grab the root.