Peering VLANs and MAC addresses

Thu Nov 10 12:45:28 UTC 2005

On Nov 9, 2005, at 7:49 PM, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:

>
> On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Robert Kiessling wrote:
>
>> Which rule would you suggest for the IXP? The naive "connect
>> only routers" wouldn't do of course in nowaday's world of
>> hybrids.
>
> yick hybrids...

I like watching some of those hybrids boot though.  It is fun to  
watch all the different layers of processors send their little boot  
messages to the console.  It is so very reassuring to know that it  
takes an 8 layered cake to make my router function.

I had a few of 7609s at one network and I was, actually, quite happy  
with the performance.   We had one failure of an OC12 card and that  
was it as I recall.  Of course this tells me very little about  
performance in "bad" situations.  If we had had a network meltdown it  
would have been interesting to observe the behavior of those switches  
in comparison to the other equipment.

It felt very weird building VLANs inside a router (and I made sure we  
only did it once so I would not wake up at night and scream).

We used RPR+ which was pretty nice.  And you pretty much can't shake  
a stick at an interface card without it popping up with an Ethernet  
interface.

I should probably summarize a bit...

a. I still don't really like hybrids and feel they are too disjointed  
in their approach to survive in the long term.
b. The 7609 hybrid was not nearly as bad as I feared.
c. I would likely NOT purchase a hybrid if I could avoid it.
d. You will probably find that a hybrid is the most cost effective  
option and will have to fight your finance folks who know a thing or  
two about routers and switches!  Well, I should say they know  
whatever the vendor is telling them behind your back<grin>.
e. You may not have to fight with finance as you may personally  
realize that you want another toy and purchasing the hybrid leaves  
you with enough capital to purchase the other toy and take the  
potential issues as a risk.