bmanning@ISI.EDU writes:

Livingston has serious problems with its BGP code and has since it was first available (going on six months now)

I don't suppose you'd care to elucidate? I'd be curious about how many updates/second this box can handle while forwarding across all interfaces at line rate, and how quickly from the receipt of an update switching to another path the forwarding engine begins sending traffic along that path, and how many christmas-tree packets flowing at line rates to a series of changing destinations are lost or mis-forwarded. Of course I tend to be interested in environments where traffic is already enormously aggregated, where all or nearly all the available bandwidth is being used, where dozens of BGP updates/second is commonplace, and where occasionally there will be "flutter" that causes large numbers of prefixes to attract data down oscillating paths. These are difficult conditions for any router, and unfortunately nobody seems to have a public benchmark which tests for them, other than the "it works/it doesn't" in the middle of large pieces of the Internet. I would be interested in actual "it works/it doesn't" commentary (and possible explanation of "it doesn't", if that's the case) involving this particular router from some sizeable ISP or other. Learning from vendor mistakes is of use to many of us.

...

Will IP multicast help with the usenet stuff?

Tangental question.

Kurt Lidl and company's excellent MUSE paper, presented at USENIX in Winter 1994 details early attempts to distribute news via the MBONE. Unfortunately the MBONE is not IP multicast in any serviceable or saleable sense, and that and the work involved in making it difficult to forge multicast USENET news tends to make the distribution of news slower and less reliable than the parallel interactive unicast scheme. On the other hand, as there has been a great deal of work on eliminating multiple MBONE tunnels across providers, this both could be less true and less important for people who are concerned about the number of copies of articles moving across their networks. On yet another hand, it might make sense for "proper" multicast facilities to be deployed as supportable products before jumping into doing MUSE or something like it in a serious way. On yet another hand, satellite dissemination of news, both with pagesat-style distribution and sniffing at satellite point-to-point transmissions using amusing tcpdump scripts or programs directly using the berkeley packet filter, have been happening for some time. On the final hand, NNTP distribution is much less broken than Web distribution, and the latter distribution problem probably deserves to be attacked first. Oh yah, out of curiosity, what native multicast support is in the Livingston box, and what does it use for routing? PIM? DVMRP? CBT? Sean.