Livingston & BGP & multicast USENET (was blah blah blah)

Wed Jun 11 00:12:34 UTC 1997

> > 	Livingston has serious problems with its BGP code and
> > 	has since it was first available (going on six
> >       months now)
> 

Huh... Uhh I am not aware of this..

> I'd be curious about how many updates/second this box can
> handle while forwarding across all interfaces at line
> rate, and how quickly from the receipt of an update
> switching to another path the forwarding engine begins
> sending traffic along that path, and how many
> christmas-tree packets flowing at line rates to a series
> of changing destinations are lost or mis-forwarded.

Well I know that on the IRX platform the router is not fast enough to 
deal with light ammounts of updates with 5 or 6 sessions and still 
forward packets.. I am told the on the PM3's that is handles it just 
fine..

The IRX is old 3 years or so 386DX-40 based where the PM3 is 486/66

For instance when we reset a IBGP session when the session 
establishes when loading the routes (15-20k) it will stop forwarding 
for 5-10 sec.

> I would be interested in actual "it works/it doesn't"
> commentary (and possible explanation of "it doesn't", if
> that's the case) involving this particular router from
> some sizeable ISP or other.  Learning from vendor mistakes
> is of use to many of us.

It works.. I am very happy with it.. On the IRX platform it is not 
ment as a backbone router but for customer connections it works 
great. We have a few of them that are not accepting BGP routes but 
are anouncing customer routes.. It seems to work real well. I hope to 
get a PM3 in here to find out how well it works.. If the performance 
is as good as I have heard and the fact that I can fit 6-8 full views 
in 16 MB of ram... we might have a winner for some of our smaller 
POP's.. 

Plus where space is not a big problem the IRX is a great price for a 
2 T1 2 56k port router for customer connects..

<Whole bunch of Multicast USENET stuff cut>
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James 'J.D.' Butt                       Voice 319.557.8463
Network Engineer                        pager 319.557.6347
MidWest Communications, Inc.            fax   319.557.9771           
241 Main St.                            noc at mwci.net
Dubuque, IA 52001                       jbutt at mwci.net
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"I used up all my sick days...   so I'm calling in dead"
"Lets fight against continental drift!"