Inter-vlan bridging for sna/netbios

Question

I have a requirement to have several vlans bridged because of sna/netbios applications. I have heard that inter-vlan bridging has the potential for many problems and have heard that running the dec protocol for bridging on the core routers instead of ieee would help in preventing these problems. I do not want the router interfaces to be root. Has anyone done this, and are there any pitfalls?
thankx

Answer 1

This is from a co-worker, Matthias Binzer:
Hi,
is the question that the customer wants to bridge into dlsw?
If yes they can use a different bridge-group per interface, thus they do not bridge the vlan's together but only into dlsw.
If you talk about pure transparent bridging i guess the answer is it depends. It depends on your topology and on the other devices paritcipating in the spanning tree. If you dont want the router doing the transparent bridging to become root while you use ieee spanning tree on the router and the switches you can set the bridge priority higher than the default. Thus we would not attempt to become root given that there are other devices with a
better bridge priority.
the usage of dec spanning tree will work as long as there is no other device bridging the same vlan's together. If there is i.e. another router bridging the same vlan's you MUST make sure that this second router also uses dec spanning tree, otherwise you create a loop.
What you essentialy do is to create separate spanning trees overlaying each other.
thanks...
Matthias