How to prevent a broadcast storm

[Yan Henrichon]

A broadcast storm is at layer 2. Is the connection rate limit or Virus Throttleling is at layer 2 or 3? I guest is three but I just want to make sure.

My thoughts are in a way to findout how to prevent a broadcast storm on a network. You know, when a user plugs in two ports of an IP phone in the same switch that has only one VLAN or a Laptop and docking station that are both connected to the network.

Thank you.

[Holger Hasenaug · Accepted solution]

On ProCurve Switches you have multiple options to prevent loops and therefore boradcast storm:

1. enable Spanning-Tree, therfore looped back STP packets should block the port

2. enable the feature "loop-protect" on en-user ports

3. configure the feature broadcast-limit which is acting on egress traffic

4. configure the feature rate-limit for broadcast traffic which is acting on ingress-traffic (but this is only available on 3500, 6200, 6600, 5400, 8200 switch series)

[Pieter 't Hart]

a broadcast is within a (v)lan (L2), so basically you should add vlan's, to limit the number of nodes in a network that can add to the broadcast-storm.

[Yan Henrichon]

Thank you for your answer guys.