Core router bakeoff?

Fri May 8 02:30:21 UTC 1998

On Thu, May 07, 1998 at 06:45:46PM -0700, Jason L. Weisberger wrote:
> On Thu, 7 May 1998, Karl Denninger wrote:
> 
> > Well, the GRF has its good and bad points.  I've tested one rather
> > extensively, although I admit it was some time (~8-9 months) ago.
> 
> I've been rather upset with Ascend over their lack of reaction to the bug
> in the Pipe 150 that had it publishing ARP statments for every ip address
> that went by its ethernet interface. Have you found their other products
> to be better supported and safer to fire and forget?
> 
> jlw

Well, I got rather, uh, pissed at the MAX 4000s desire to publish both a 
/32 and a /29 route for all OSPF announcements on dial interfaces (which 
went unaddressed in the code for literally months) - particularly troublesome 
when you consider the limited RAM in those boxes (and the consequence of 
running out of it - it would just drop the OSPF process entirely!), not 
to mention a direct violation of the OSPF specifications and the cause of 
many complaints from other equipment which this generated.

I've heard they have cleaned up their software act in the last several
months; other than P130s as customer routers for DS1 users (of which we have
a boatload deployed) I have zero *current* operational experience with their
equipment, so my knowledge base on them is ~6-9 months old.

Then again, I'm a SOB when it comes to standards complience, especially when
lack thereof breaks something that we *NEED* around here (such as reliable
service :-).

I still don't like CISCO's RAS implementations, but I have to say this - 
for all their warts, including some business policies that I consider
nothing short of INSANE, their router hardware and IOS still win the prize 
for uptime in my experience.

A real example from our core:

XXXXXXX-CoreX uptime is 38 weeks, 1 day, 7 hours, 49 minutes
System restarted by power-on

That's pretty typical around here; the last "power on" was to do routine
maintenance on that particular device. :-)

--
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Karl Denninger (karl at MCS.Net)| MCSNet - Serving Chicagoland and Wisconsin
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