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RE: Cisco as Big Brother (Was Re: Cisco's AIP vs HSSI)
by Chris A. Icide 17 Oct '96

17 Oct '96

>One of the reasons that cisco has earned its place as Number One is >that, to my knowledge, cisco has never terminally screwed a client. >No other contender can make that claim with me. I've been screwed by >all of them, except cisco. They don't always give me what I want when >I want it, but they don't do fundamentally bad things like walking >away from the ISP market as Proteon did or wiping out their upper >management team as Wellfleet did from time to time. > > >--Kent I've had my problems with Cisco, and there have been many, however, I must say that when you poke them in the eye and say, "uhm, I've got a problem that needs fixing now!", the engineers pop out of the walls like that green thing in Ghostbusters. They slime things all up, and quickly pull a working solution out of the muck. In fact, I found myself at O'Hare Airport in Chicago early Sunday morning picking up two routers and a bunch of interface cards. Cisco had been working on an unidentifiable prblem, and decided that we may need to unload a couple of our routers so they zipped out a couple of extra routers to us, along with an engineer. Anyway, I know that I can count on their customer support organization to immediately respond to my needs. The ONLY other company I ever worked with that offered (and met) this level of support was HP. Chris

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Re: sprint and multihoming
by William Allen Simpson 17 Oct '96

17 Oct '96

> From: randy(a)psg.com (Randy Bush) > Some weeks back, I whined about SprintLink's policies and implementation in > respect to multi-homing. They did not leak the multi-homer's more specific > prefix outside of SprintLink. Nor did they accept the longer prefix from > outside, hence traffic from SL customers would die when the MHed site's SL > link was down. > Me, too.... > I just wanted to publicly thank SprintLink, and Hank Kilmer and his team in > particular, for fixing this. IMIHO, this makes SprintLink a reasonable > choice for a provider if you intend to multi-home. > Hmmm, well, as I reported here earlier, we already changed our ISP contract away from Sprint. But, for my clients, based on your representation that it is finally working, I suppose that I might be willing to at least allow Sprint in future multi-home bids, as long as the contract specifically requires Sprint to be on better behaviour. Thanks for the update, Randy! WSimpson(a)UMich.edu Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32 BSimpson(a)MorningStar.com Key fingerprint = 2E 07 23 03 C5 62 70 D3 59 B1 4F 5E 1D C2 C1 A2

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Are there plans to do MBONE broadcasts of the upcoming meeting?
by Curtis Generous 17 Oct '96

17 Oct '96

..for those of us who might not be able to make it to Michigan? There was a pretty good turnout on the last NANOG session in DC. --curtis -- Curtis Generous generous(a)uucom.com Phone: (703) 461-1350 UUcom Inc., Suite 250, 4875 Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304-0797

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sprint and multihoming
by randy＠psg.com 17 Oct '96

17 Oct '96

Some weeks back, I whined about SprintLink's policies and implementation in respect to multi-homing. They did not leak the multi-homer's more specific prefix outside of SprintLink. Nor did they accept the longer prefix from outside, hence traffic from SL customers would die when the MHed site's SL link was down. I just wanted to publicly thank SprintLink, and Hank Kilmer and his team in particular, for fixing this. IMIHO, this makes SprintLink a reasonable choice for a provider if you intend to multi-home. Thanks SL. Thanks Hank. randy

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Re: hole punching reality check
by Eric Kozowski 17 Oct '96

17 Oct '96

>I would expect the world to see the following announcements. > >A - I announcing a shorter prefix, A >B - P announcing a more specific for the /24 allocated to C > >Is this not what we all expect? Sounds like the right thing to me. >Why I ask is we have provider P telling I that they should stop announcing A >and instead announce a bunch of prefixes around the /24. They're nuts. Eric -- Eric Kozowski Senior Network Engineer eric(a)structured.net Structured Network Systems, Inc. (503)656-3235 FAX Better, Cheaper, Faster -- pick any two. (800)881-0962 Voice http://www.structured.net/ "Providing High Quality, Reliable Internet Service" -- 56k to DS1

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Re: Cisco as Big Brother (Was Re: Cisco's AIP vs HSSI)
by Paul Ferguson 16 Oct '96

16 Oct '96

At 06:30 AM 10/16/96 +0100, Peter Galbavy wrote: > >No. I think the phrase *actually* used at a meeting (I was elsewhere >that day) was "It is a priveledge to deal with a market leader like >Cisco." This was the Cisco sales rep, not us. sigh. > >Buy! Buy! Bye Bye. :-P > Well sorry to hear that you met up with such a twit. I personally carry a large baseball bat around for specifically that reason. I've even had to use it a few times. ;-) - paul

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Re: Building Evacuation [Re: BBN outage]
by Kent W. England 16 Oct '96

16 Oct '96

At 10:39 AM 10/16/96 -0400, Curtis Villamizar wrote: > >We have a backup NOC 1,200 miles away. All the tools are set up and >kept running in two places and at least once a year Ann Arbor >intentionally hands off NOC duties to Elmsford. The people issue is >the main problem, with Elmsford not being as familiar with day to day >NOC operations. Both NOCs are connected to two POPs in different >states with alegedly diverse circuits. Neither NOC has generators but >the last time the UPS ran out we had NOC service cut over in time. >This is also why we have DNS servers in different states (and kerberos >slave servers and other critical services). > >I don't think a cell phone and a laptop would cut it. > >Curtis > > Curtis; Nobody does it better. --Kent

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Re: Cisco as Big Brother (Was Re: Cisco's AIP vs HSSI)
by Paul J. Zawada 16 Oct '96

16 Oct '96

For the record, my Cisco saleperson and pre-sales engineer have always been supportive of my efforts to run a multi-vendor network and never has laid any of this "it's a priveledge to work with Cisco" crap on me. They don't do a hard sell to get my business, but that's OK since I prefer to talk to salespeople only when I need something from them... They don't hesitate to say they're better than everybody else, but they do continue to work for me instead of the other way around. (What salesperson doesn't claim to work for the company that's better than everyone else?) Having said that, there are certainly some salespeople with Cisco that are, to be polite, overzealous in their dealings with customers. These types of salespeople (whatever company they sell for) should be chased away immediately. It seems that most people that I've talked to that have had this experience with Cisco have been from Europe (not to say it doesn't happen in the US), so I wonder if for one reason or another the Cisco European salesforce tends to work that way. It's too bad for Cisco, because if they'd had used this tactic on me, I would have certainly shown them the door... --zawada At 06:30 AM 10/16/96 +0100, Peter Galbavy wrote: >> The salespeople in the UK are using that tactic too? If a sales rep >> EVER walked into my office and fed me a line like that, I would end the >> meeting right there. As it is, I refuse to do business with Cisco not >> because of their products, but because of their marketing department >> and their corporate attitude of "We're the best, nobody can touch us, >> and if you want to buy our product you better bend over backwards to do >> what we want you to do." That was their attitude three years ago when >> our company was just getting started, and I haven't noticed it change >> much today. > >No. I think the phrase *actually* used at a meeting (I was elsewhere >that day) was "It is a priveledge to deal with a market leader like >Cisco." This was the Cisco sales rep, not us. sigh. > >Buy! Buy! Bye Bye. :-P > >Regards, >-- >Peter Galbavy peter(a)wonderland.org >@ Home phone://44/973/499465 >in Wonderland http://www.wonderland.org/~peter/ > snail://UK/NW1_6LE/London/21_Harewood_Avenue/ > > Paul J. Zawada, RCDD | Senior Network Engineer zawada(a)ncsa.uiuc.edu | National Center for Supercomputing Applications +1 217 244 4728 | http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/zawada

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Building Evacuation [Re: BBN outage]
by Kent W. England 16 Oct '96

16 Oct '96

At 09:06 PM 12-10-96 -0700, maillists wrote: > >In hindsight, solutions to tolerate a given failure are >very easy to come by but shouldn't be talked down. I did not >blame BBN--shit happens-- One thing constructive I would note that I haven't seen yet is that while one can imagine many awful scenarios where your lovely NOC is absolutely leveled (*) by a horrendous accident, it is much more likely that your NOC will be forced to evacuate for some "trivial" reason. Perhaps asbestos. Perhaps a gas main leak in the street. Perhaps the fire alarms just keep going off. Perhaps the power went off and the fire marshall won't let anyone stay in the building without elevator power. It might very well have been the case that had BBN had a backup generator they might still have been forced to evacuate the building, if the fire dept was paying attention. You have to remember that it's harder to keep people in a given building than it is to safeguard the equipment there. You always have to be ready to send your NOC operators packing with a cell phone and a laptop for up to 48 hours, in case the building has to be evacuated for one of a dozen reasons. You should have a backup call center with an ACD set up in some other city or a contract with someone for a backup service. --Kent (*) My nightmare scenario back when I ran the NOC at BBN at 10 Moulton Street was a gasoline tanker turning over in the street out front. The gasoline runs down the stairwell into the sunken parking lot under the building. Someone exits the building into the parking lot and lights a cigarette ... Next moment my NOC and 300 people are ashes and there's a 60 foot crater where the building used to be.

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Windows/NT to break the Internet?
by Hank Nussbacher 16 Oct '96

16 Oct '96

How long can the Internet last if every customer needs to get a /24? That is what appears to be with Windows/NT 4.0. This server has lately become very popular with small customers that install an NT server and a few PCs and want a connection. ISPs up to know would assign a /26 or perhaps a /27 or even a /30 to SOHOs like this. Windows NT 4.0 when defining the address range as well as the DNS and inverse - only has space in the form for 3 octets. They assume you are a /24 or larger. I have had customers come back to me and say that they can't even enter the 255.255.255.224 mask I gave them on their system since the NT doesn't support it. Let alone the problems with inverse subnetting that there is a draft RFC out there that almost everyone follows. Seems to have slipped by the people in Oregon, though. I have been very careful up till now to make optimal use of IP address space but I fear with the plenthora of WinNT 4.0s out there we will see 2% utilization of IP address space in the future. Am I missing something here on WinNT installs? Or is Microsoft gonna cause the IP address space to expire sooner than we had planned? Hank Nussbacher IBM Israel

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