If you have played with some Cisco switches before you might have noticed that every time you plug in a cable the led above the interface is orange and after a while becomes green. What is happening at this moment is that spanning tree is determining the state of the interface.
This is what happens as soon as you plug in a cable:
- Listening state: Only a root or designated port will move to the listening state. The non-designated port will stay in the blocking state. No data transmission occurs at this state for 15 seconds just to make sure the topology doesn’t change in the meantime. After the listening state, we move to the learning state.
- Learning state: At this moment the interface will process Ethernet frames by looking at the source MAC address to fill the mac-address-table. Ethernet frames, however, are not forwarded to the destination. It takes 15 seconds to move to the next state, called the forwarding state.
- Forwarding state: This is the final state of the interface, and finally, the interface will forward Ethernet frames so that we have data transmission!
When a port is not a designated or root port, it will be in blocking mode.
This means it takes 30 seconds in total to move from listening to forwarding…that’s not really fast right? This will happen on all interfaces on the switch.
When an interface is in blocking mode and the topology changes, it’s possible that an interface that is currently in blocking mode has to move to the forwarding state. When this is the case, the blocking mode will last for 20 seconds before it moves to the listening state. This means that it takes 20 (blocking) + 15 (listening) + 15 (learning) = 50 seconds before the interface is in the forwarding state.
Thirty seconds is a long time, right? Any modern PC with an SSD drive boots faster than that. Here’s an overview of the different port states:
| State | Forward Frames | Learn MAC Addresses | Duration |
| Blocking | No | No | 20 seconds |
| Listening | No | No | 15 seconds |
| Learning | No | Yes | 15 seconds |
| Forwarding | Yes | Yes | – |
So, what does this look like on an actual Cisco switch? Let me show you an example of an interface that is connected to a router. I just unplugged and plugged the cable (or do a shut and no shut) and the first time we run the show command, it looks like this:
SW1#show spanning-tree vlan
VLAN0001
Spanning tree enabled protocol ieee
Root ID Priority 32769
Address 0019.569d.5700
This bridge is the root
Hello Time 2 sec Max Age 20 sec Forward Delay 15 sec
Bridge ID Priority 32769 (priority 32768 sys-id-ext 1)
Address 0019.569d.5700
Hello Time 2 sec Max Age 20 sec Forward Delay 15 sec
Aging Time 300
Interface Role Sts Cost Prio.Nbr Type
------------------- ---- --- --------- -------- --------------------------------
Fa0/1 Desg LIS 19 128.4 P2pYou can see that the role of the port is designated, and the status is listening. Keep refreshing this show command, and after ~ 15 seconds, it looks like this:
SW1#show spanning-tree vlan 1
VLAN0001
Spanning tree enabled protocol ieee
Root ID Priority 32769
Address 0019.569d.5700
This bridge is the root
Hello Time 2 sec Max Age 20 sec Forward Delay 15 sec
Bridge ID Priority 32769 (priority 32768 sys-id-ext 1)
Address 0019.569d.5700
Hello Time 2 sec Max Age 20 sec Forward Delay 15 sec
Aging Time 300
Interface Role Sts Cost Prio.Nbr Type
------------------- ---- --- --------- -------- --------------------------------
Fa0/1 Desg LRN 19 128.4 P2pIt has moved to the learning state, and after another ~ 15 seconds, it looks like this:
When we connect a cable on Switch which runs STP on a unused port, will whole switch run STP on all ports and all ports move from Listening – Learning–Forwarding mode?
Is the whole switch operation affected? or the port we just connected?
Regards,
Veerender
Hi Veerender,
It’s done per interface, not for all interfaces on the switch.
Rene
Hello, Rene
... Continue reading in our forumif we suppose that we have 3 switch…we power on them…after booting,
the port of each switch connected each other goes into listening ,because they need to do an election…(in this 15 seconds a port is learning if it will be root port,designated port , or non designated port. Once understood, if it wiil be non designated goes into blocking state otherwise it’s going into learning and then forwarding).Now the switch network will be converged…If now I focus at the port in blocking state ,it receive BPDU by a peer designatet port,every 2 sec, and sto
Hi Francesco,
The TCN is the trigger to set the aging time, the originating switch will reduce its aging the time and other switches will as soon as they receive the TCN.
Rene
That was very good, I would also like to see the same output from a non root switch, and see at which point it changes from designated to root or non-designated. I guess the whole point of this is I can set it up myself and watch what happens.
Chris