On Wed, 11 Jun 1997, Peter Leppik wrote:

I've been hearing conflicting stories about the Ascend GRF lately. Cisco claims that it doesn't really work as advertised in "realistic networks," but Ascend says this is because Cisco's routers melt down when the GRF feeds them routing table updates, so the GRF has to be throttled back to work in a mixed environment.

Does anybody have any real experience here? Any information, pointers, anecdotes, or wild rumors would help.

Yes, right now we have 100% GRFs in our network, and have had a few problem with more then 46 peering sessions on one GRF. This problem was fixed Friday, and we now have over 50 sessions up on our MAE-East router. We also ran into problem with people sending us a router ID of 0.0.0.0 (not something they should do), Ascend added a flag to gated to let gated peer with 0.0.0.0 if you want. So far we are happy with the GRF, there are some thing I would like to see. I think there is a need for redundant processor cards, and the ability to load balance over interfaces. I still think the GRF blows away the Cisco 7500, but we have not tested the new RSP4 cards. We plan to test this in the next few weeks, and will then decided if we are going to say cisco free, or if we need to make a hardware change. Nathan Stratton President, NetRail,Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phone (888)NetRail NetRail, Inc. Fax (404)522-1939 230 Peachtree Suite 500 WWW http://www.netrail.net/ Atlanta, GA 30303 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. - Psalm 33:16