Yesterday I was able to imagine for a while being settled in the workplace, at least or some period of time. Today - not so much. It was a bad day in class, as I struggled to focus on a technology I have always found a little baffling, and which for some reason I have always found to be profoundly uninteresting and tedious.

Try digesting this stuff with your lunch around 2pm, when civilized folks are in the midst of their afternoon naps...

"...Bridges encode an MD5 digest of their VLAN to instance table in the MSTP BPDU. This digest is then used by other MSTP bridges, along with other administratively configured values, to determine if the neighboring bridge is in the same MST region as itself. MSTP is fully compatible with RSTP bridges, in that an MSTP BPDU can be interpreted by an RSTP bridge as an RSTP BPDU. This not only allows compatibility with RSTP bridges without configuration changes, but also causes any RSTP bridges outside of an MSTP region to see the region as a single RSTP bridge, regardless of the number of MSTP bridges inside the region itself. In order to further facilitate this view of an MST region as a single RSTP bridge, the MSTP protocol uses a variable known as remaining hops as a time to live counter instead of the message age timer used by RSTP. The message age time is only incremented once when spanning tree information enters an MST region, and therefore RSTP bridges will see a region as only one "hop" in the spanning tree..."

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