Network Routing without Cisco or Juniper?

Wed Sep 4 08:55:54 UTC 2002

In article <cistron.20020904074946.GA84187 at dataloss.nl>,
Peter van Dijk  <peter at dataloss.nl> wrote:
>On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 03:39:25AM -0400, Deepak Jain wrote:
>[snip]
>>  Boxes like Foundry, Extreme, Redback and many others all talk BGP 
>>  (at least to a first approximation) but is their lack of use in 
>>  the core/edge/CPE a lack of scale, stability, performance or just 
>>  interest?
>
>One Dutch ISP that shall remain unnamed (and is not one I work for or
>have worked for) deployed Extreme on AMS-IX, with Extreme's BGP
>implementation.
>
>It broke horribly. The Extreme BGP implementation, instead of sending
>their peers just their own prefixes, would send each peer *all*
>prefixes and then withdraw all but their own networks. However, doing
>this with tens of peers at the same time was too much for the Extreme
>itself, which died.

OTOH, I know of other ISPs also present on the AMS-IX that have
been using Extreme switches to connect to the AMS-IX and their
upstreams without any of those problems. Their network has been
very stable for over a year now, I think. It's even a fault-tolerant
setup with VRRP.

Cistron IP is using a Foundry switch right now as core router.
You can't get a BGP/OSPF router with lots of GigE and 10/100
interfaces for that price over at C or J ..

We had some problems with instability at first, but with recent
firmware everything runs just fine.

We have several full BGP upstreams and over a hundred of AMS-IX
peers (at GigE) and it works fine.

On of the nicest things is that the box boots in 15 seconds or
so and even with >100 BGP sessions coming up simultaneously
it's still fast - a Cisco would take minutes to get all BGP
sessions up, the Foundry does it in mere seconds.

Mike.