300-420 Exam Dumps : Designing Cisco Enterprise Networks (ENSLD) v1.1

Loop guard should be used on SW2 to reduce the chance of Layer 2 forwarding loops caused by a unidirectional fiber failure. In spanning-tree operation, a root or alternate port expects to receive BPDUs from the designated bridge. If BPDUs stop arriving because the fiber becomes unidirectional, the port may incorrectly assume that the path is no longer receiving a superior BPDU and transition toward forwarding. Cisco loop guard prevents this by moving the port into a loop-inconsistent state when BPDUs are unexpectedly lost on a non-designated port. That behavior protects the topology from a port role change that could create a Layer 2 loop. BPDU filter is dangerous in this context because it can suppress BPDUs and hide the control-plane signal STP needs. BPDU guard is mainly for PortFast edge ports that should never receive BPDUs. Root guard prevents superior BPDUs from changing root placement, but it does not address unidirectional loss of expected BPDUs. Therefore, loop guard on SW2 is the proper design control. Reference topics: STP loop guard, unidirectional fiber failure, BPDU loss, loop-inconsistent state, Layer 2 resiliency.

BFD is not required for the specific failure described: a physical fiber break on point-to-point routed links. In a Layer 3 campus or routed-access design, a direct physical link failure is detected by the interface state change, so the routing protocol can react immediately without waiting for hello/dead timers. Cisco campus design guidance favors point-to-point routed links partly because they give rapid convergence and avoid STP delays. BFD is valuable when a forwarding-path failure is not reliably detected by Layer 1 or Layer 2, or when a protocol adjacency must detect loss faster than its native timers. It does not automatically create convergence by itself; it detects failure and notifies the routing protocol. For a clean fiber cut on a routed point-to-point link, link-down detection is already fast enough for sub-second failover in the design. OSPF timer tuning is also not the preferred design answer for this physical-failure case. Reference topics: routed access design, point-to-point links, link-failure detection, BFD, OSPF convergence.

Advertising more-specific prefixes toward the preferred service provider is the correct way to influence inbound traffic to enter through a chosen CE interface. BGP inbound path control is indirect: the enterprise cannot set local preference inside remote autonomous systems, and MED is honored only under specific provider policies. The most deterministic option available to the customer is to advertise a longer-prefix route to the preferred provider because Internet and BGP route selection generally prefer the longest matching prefix before BGP path attributes are considered. If the aggregate is advertised to both providers but a more-specific route is advertised to the provider connected to gig0/0, return traffic for that more- specific destination is attracted through that interface. Lowering MED toward the less preferred provider is the opposite of the desired effect. AS-path prepending toward the preferred provider would make that path less attractive. Local preference affects outbound path selection inside the local AS, not inbound traffic from external networks. Reference topics: BGP inbound traffic engineering, longest-prefix match, route aggregation, AS-path prepending, MED, local preference.