Do Airports have 802.1d Spanning Tree Protocol?

Hello world,
Do Airports support 802.1d (Spanning Tree Protocol)?

I administer a growing network at a School here in New Zealand, with 4 Airports. The Airports all crash frequently and are susceptible to unicast floods when used in bridge mode and clients roam. I can find no mention of 802.1d support in the documentation and find it hard to believe a cheap Taiwanese wireless router supports 802.1d but no Airport does.

To solve the problem I have resorted to using NAT and DHCP on the Airports but this is a less-than-ideal solution and limits what I can do with the network.

Linux, Other OS, 2.6.17.7

Posted on Jul 27, 2006 8:45 PM

Reply
10 replies

Jul 27, 2006 9:51 PM in response to barf

First, welcome to the discussions.
The reason that Airport doesn't support d protacall is because of rules and laws imposed by the different countries.Below is the Standard for 802.11d protocall.
IEEE 802.11d Standard
IEEE 802.11d is supplementary to the Media Access Control (MAC) layer in 802.11 to promote worldwide use of 802.11 WLANs. It will allow access points to communicate information on the permissible radio channels with acceptable power levels for user devices. The 802.11 standards cannot legally operate in some countries; the purpose of 11d is to add features and restrictions to allow WLANs to operate within the rules of these countries. Comments: In countries where the physical layer radio requirements are different from those in North America, the use of WLANs is lagging behind. Equipment manufacturers do not want to produce a wide variety of country-specific products and users that travel do not want a bag full of country-specific WLAN PC cards. The outcome will be country-specific firmware solutions.
Cheers Don

Jul 28, 2006 12:38 PM in response to Donald Morgan

Donald

There is a difference between

802.1d - there is a single 1

and

802.11d - there are two 1s

BOTH end in d, but they are different things.

802.1d - 802.1D is the IEEE MAC Bridges standard which includes Bridging, Spanning Tree, interworking for 802.11 and others. It is standardized by the IEEE 802.1 working group.

802.11d - The IEEE 802.11d standard is also referred to as the Global Harmonization standard. It is used in countries where systems using other standards in the IEEE 802.11 family are not allowed to operate.

Jul 28, 2006 12:52 PM in response to iFelix

iFelix, I appreciate your input. I did realize what you explained , I foolishly wrote the response incorrectly but after all was said and done, my explination about the fact that the protocall was different in some countries and that was the reason the AEBS or the AE wouldn't support the 802.1d protocall.
If this is wrong please feel free to set me straight.
Don

Aug 1, 2006 7:49 PM in response to barf

I thought using NAT on the Airports would stop them crashing when nodes roamed but two of the four Airports have crashed again (no ping reply) and syslog messages stopped at midnight when noone was even using the network!!

I am using the latest firmware and all Airports are simply connected to a switch via their WAN port.

Not only do they lack features formalised in 1990 they crash for no reason! When RMA'd I was told they work fine. But they do not.

If an Apple rep would prefer to discretely help me resolve this issue I would welcome an off-list email, otherwise I have mounting evidence these Airports are not suited for large, or even small-scale deployment

The last received message from the airport before it crashed was: "Installed unicast CCMP key for supplicant <mac_removed>"

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Do Airports have 802.1d Spanning Tree Protocol?

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