AT&T NYC

Tue Sep 3 15:36:51 UTC 2002

On Tue, Sep 03, 2002 at 10:24:44AM +0100, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
> 
> Do you run a decent sized network? Convergence time in the order of that
> taken by BGP is not acceptable, things go crazy when traffic pours in
> and theres no routes to carry it.

Alex ran a decent sized network back when there were a lot of Crisco bugs
which managed to wipe out entire networks running OSPF. Now admittidly I
havn't seen one of these in a while (according to UU they've been shifting
their focus to ISIS bugs which wipe out entire networks :P), but we are
all a product of our past experiences.

Experience is a good thing, but it can also be limiting. Things change,
and sometimes being burned by experience can prevent us from trying things
which may have a different outcome now. That is why humans get old and
die, so new people can make fresh mistakes, and fresh discoveries.
Otherwise we'd still be thinking the world was flat, the sun revolves
around the earth, and man could never travel faster than 20mph. Just 
remember that computers change a lot faster than the human lifespan (and 
no I'm not encouraging anyone to bump off Alex :P), so even Cisco might 
manage to get one right. :)

Trusting your IGP is a judgement call, but if you ever find yourself in a
situation where you really can't trust it, you can look back on Alex's
post and find a fairly reasonable way to run a network without it. I
suggest we all take it as such and move on, 'cause otherwise this debate 
will go on until someone DOES die (and not necessarily old age :P).

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177  (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA  B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)