You remember from your CCNA studies that when a port goes through the transition from blocking to forwarding, you’re looking at a 50-second delay before that port can actually begin forwarding frames. Configuring a port with PortFast is one way to get around that, but again, you can only use it when a single host device is found off the port. What if the device connected to a port is another switch?
A switch can be connected to two other switches, giving that local switch a redundant path to the root bridge, and that’s great – we always want a backup plan! However, STP will only allow one path to be available, but if the available path to the root switch goes down, there will be a 50-second delay due to the STP timers MaxAge and ForwardDelay before the currently blocked path will be available.
The delay is there to prevent switching loops, and we can’t use PortFast to shorten the delay since these are switches, not host devices. What we can use is Uplinkfast.
The ports that SW3 could potentially use to reach the root switch are collectively referred to as an uplink group. The uplink group includes the ports in forwarding and...
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