From: Adam S. Roth (adam@therothfamily.net)
Date: Fri Sep 30 2005 - 11:50:10 GMT-3
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-----Original Message-----
From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of Deep
Ratan
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 10:48 AM
To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
Subject: layer-2 interview question
Hi Everyone,
Sorry to ask a networking-101 question but being a WAN guy, I haven't been
working with switches in the past few years. An interviewer asked me this
question, "If I give you a MAC address that is causing a broadcast storm,
how will you locate the culprit in a switched environment that has several
dozen switches and routers?"
I replied, "You'll need to give me a layer-3 address so I can trace it to
the right switch/router and then look up the ARP table to see on what port
the offending machine lives" The interviewer didn't like the answer. In
retrospect, I should probably have said, "A broadcast storm renders the
network unusable, so I'll start with looking at my network management
station to see what LAN segment is giving off a critical alarm"
Anyway, my question to members of groupstudy is this: In an environment with
several dozen switches, if you're given just a MAC address, can you find out
where the machine lives?
thanks, Deep
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