Warning, CDP interaction at Mae-EAST

Wed May 14 15:03:57 UTC 1997

> Why on EARTH?!? would _ANYONE_ run CDP at a MAE or any other exchange point?

You would be suprised at the large number of folks who've got CDP enabled
at the exchange points -- Ironically, we enabled it to get a sense of what
other IOS versions were running on our peers routers prior to a code 
upgrade to fix some issues that were affecting us.

> Especially given the congestion, and other problems at the MAE's, why run
> a protocol to discover other Cisco's you have to explicitly configure peering
> sessions with anyway?  If someone can explain a reason not to turn off CDP
> at an exchange point, I'm all ears.

Given that its on by default cdp needs to either be turned off completely,
or disabled for a particular interface, folks probably just leave it on.

I highly doubt CDP contributes to congestion problems with the little
amount of traffic it generates - Although if you've ever looked at some of
the traffic at the Mae's you'd be sickened by all of the other things
floating around.  

I suppose another eason to disable CDP in addition to disabling any
non-essencial traffic and/or processes would be for privacy. 