Interworking between Cisco PVST and Mikrotik Bridge STP

RouterOS General
1

Dear All

I have a Layer 2 connection between office network and remote site using EoIP tunnel. which is a great! but i have observe a problem on the STP connection.

The office network are using good old Cisco 2950 and 2960G switch, having the PVST configured for loop free connection. while the mikrotik using a VLAN trunk to interwork with the switch.

One of the VLAN, using Mikrotik bridge between Cisco side and EoIP.

I found in the Bridge, it show itself as the STP root port. while the Cisco 2960 saying it is the root port. It look like Cisco and Mikrotik STP are not interworking.. i had tried to configure the RSTP and STP at mikrotik side both does not work.

Currently i have not face any problem yet.. as no loop was developed. but if someone done something stupid i may have problem.. hope someone can give me an advise.

Benny

2

I know this is over 10 years old but still true today with ROS 7.x - Mikrotik does NOT understand PVST+ - at all. I’m finding this out the hard way by trying to mesh a Mikrotik network with RSTP and a Cisco network running Rapid-PVST, with a third network running FS.com switches likely running a form of STP or RSTP. It appears the most obvious would be to migrate to MSTP since Cisco speaks MSTP. However in this case the Cisco belongs to an even larger corporate environment and changing from Rapid-PVST would be a large undertaking. I think the near term fix is to not allow BPDU between the Mikrotik and Cisco environments and each have their own spanning trees.