I visited a HP Procurve seminar yesterda ... / 2007-09-20

I visited a HP Procurve seminar yesterday about network security. Interesting talks, including one by the HP Procurve security architect. I had a chat with him about network loops which took down the university network a few times recently and he told me that HP Procurve switches now offer loop protection which would detect loops (even the ones that spanning tree would 'miss' because some older equipment may silently drop spanning tree packets), shutdown the originating port and report the error. The security architect told me that unauthorized loops and rogue dhcp servers are the major problems in university networks, and I agree. I found a weblog entry describing the HP Procurve loop protection very nicely.