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fortigeorge
New Member
June 9, 2021
Question

Fortigate 60F and Cisco ACI BPDU issue

  • June 9, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 3522 views

Hi,

 

I'm trying to connect a Fortigate 60F internal port to a Cisco N2K FEX switch as a management interface so I can manage it remotely through our lab setup.

 

The problem I'm having is once connected the switch is putting the port into an 'bpdu-guard-err-disabled' state.

 

I just wanted to confirm that an out of the box Fortigate 60F firewall in NAT mode wouldn't be sending spanning tree BPDU's out of the internal interface?

 

What I need is for this 'internal' port to behave like a regular access port.

    1 reply

    Dan_Eng52
    Explorer III
    April 17, 2025

    Hey Fortigeorge, 

     

    I hope you're well. 

     

    If this is the default 'internal' interface that is created from default, this is a virtual switch. Because you're connecting this to a device that has STP enabled for loop protection some changes to the FortiGate are required otherwise it will recognise this link as a blocked link such as in this case. 

     

    You could disable STP entirely on the virtual-switch interface or at least disable forwarding of STP: 

     

    config system interface
    edit internal
    set stp {enable | disable}
    next

    end

     

    config system interface

    edit internal

    set stpforward {enable | disable}

    set l2forward {enable | disable}

    end

     

    However, in your case I feel it would be better to use an individual L3 interface on the FortiGate rather than the virtual-switch. You can either remove one of the interfaces out of the default virtual-switch and connect this to a VLAN on the Cisco switch for connectivity with an IP address configured on the FortiGate interface to management. 

     

    Or, if you aren't using the 'internal' interface, I would remove all references of that interface, delete the interface and you have all the ports available to use how you would like. As a part of my base builds, I delete the default virtual-switch as I do not use it in my builds. 

     

    Try one of the above and let me know which one you use and if it works....it should!

     

    Thanks, 

    Dan. 
        

     

     

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