Patent ID: 7941837

Claim:
A method comprising: concurrently designating a first layer two (L2) firewall and a second L2 firewall as active L2 firewalls within the same L2 network; and concurrently applying L2 firewall services to packets within the L2 network with the first L2 firewall and the second L2 firewall by: receiving, with the first L2 firewall and the second L2 firewall, copies of a same one of the packets within the L2 network; and disregarding one of the copies of the packet with one of the L2 firewalls based on a virtual local area network (VLAN) identifier associated with the packet, wherein the first L2 firewall operates with the second L2 firewall within the same L2 network without executing the Spanning Tree Protocol on a per-VLAN basis.