Free Cisco CCNA Training: Portfast

Portfast is a feature that allows switches to place ports in the forwarding state immediately, avoiding the standard near-minute delay on Spanning Tree Protocol Timers (specifically, the listening and learning states.) In this Cisco CCNA training video, I’ll show you how to enable portfast, and more importantly, I’ll explain when portfast should and should not be used.

When considering how long it can take a port to go from blocking to forwarding when it stops receiving Hello BPDUs (Bridge Protocol Data Units,) it becomes quite obvious why you would want to use something like portfast. However, while portfast can be very beneficial for end-user machines, it can also wreak havoc if used improperly or on other types of devices (such as hubs, concentrators, switches, bridges, etc.), as explained in Cisco’s warning shown on the switch before being allowed to configure it.

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