You are right [was Re: Ungodly packet loss rates]

Tue Oct 29 22:12:02 UTC 1996

I hate to whip a dead horse, but letting stuff like this pass as accepted
is probably not the best thing...

> <jhall at rex.isdn.net> writes:  
>
> well if you're going to compare ciscos and bay networks routers, 
> consider that Bay networks supports Rip, OSPF, BGP, and EGP. They do 
> *NOT* support communities in their production software,

Actually, its in 11.0, which is now production software, and i *think*
it might even have made it into 10.x.  No confederations AFAIK. 

> and they have *NO* 
> intentions of *EVER* supporting confederations. In adition, to handle 
> subnets, where you want the thing to summarise a subnet into a classful 
> route, the Bay's solution is to drop the route entirely.

I you mean the trait of using classfull mask defaults for route
aggregation, yes that is/was an issue. I think 11.0 has a switch to turn
that off now though (if not production, one of the workspaces). Its not a
major issue really, as this can easily be accomplished with policy
filters, which is how we do it. I would say this is the preferable way to
do it, as it isolates bogus IGP information and makes troubleshooting much
easier. 

> They also don't 
> seem to understand how to aggregate routes. Their solution there is also 
> to drop the route. They do not appear to have the option to announce the 
> aggregate with the routes. They also do not appear to have the option of 
> aggregating since the option they provide does not work. Their SNMP 
> agent only works on a few platforms, and in order to adequately solve a 
> routing problem, you need to have a *GOOD* understanding of the MIB.

This is false. I used to believe this too, and am quite familiar with the
MIBs as a result. But then there is TI scripting, and it made life much
simpler (at least, it made wfIpBaseRtEntry.7.* much easier to type). The
ip commands in 10.x also make this easier. Of course, this is all if
you're a die-hard CLI fan. 

> last time I enabled syslog on the box, the router reloaded several times 
> within a 5 hour period, causing instability in our small network, small 
> meaning under 200 routes.

Can't speak for this, as i do local logging, not syslog. However, we
currently have several Bay boxes with full internet routes and multiple
peers, and the only problem i've had recently is from a Cisco peer feeding
me bad announcements.

>  I have fought with these things for 3 years 
> now and haven't seen much improvements. They have been promising NTP 
> support for quite some time now, since their routers don't have a 
> battery-powered clock.  Maybe the reason they can switch packets faster 

NTP client is in 11.0, though not server.

> and more reliably than ciscos is because they are unable to be placed in 
> a situation to really test their skills. The items I have shown here 
> make it VERRY difficult to allow one of these things to perform with 
> full routing because you cannot determine what it will do.

We have actually seen quite a bit of improvement (and i'll be the first to
admit, there was a lot of room for it). However, i'm not sure i agree with
your statement about 'full routing'. We are running BGP, RIP, and OSPF all
here, in various nodes, without serious problems. True, you do need to
have a good understanding of accept/announce policies, but i find the
performance/capability more than acceptable.

- jeremy

// Jeremy Hinton			Visionary Systems, Inc.
// jgh at visi.net				    http://www.visi.net
// Network Engineer		               Newport News, VA
// A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men 