Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2009 10:09:00 +0000 From: bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com
... well... while there is a certain childlike obession with the byzantine, rube-goldburg, lots of bells, knobs, whistles type machines... for solid, predictable performance, simple clean machines work best.
like you i long for the days when a DELNI could do this job. nobody makes hubs anymore though. but the above text juxtaposes poorly against the below text:
Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:35:51 +0100 From: Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org>
... These days, we have switches which do multicast and broadcast storm control, unicast flood control, mac address counting, l2 and l3 acls, dynamic arp inspection, and they can all be configured to ignore bpdus in a variety of imaginative ways. We have arp sponges and broadcast monitors. ...
in terms of solid and predictable i would take per-peering VLANs with IP addresses assigned by the peers themselves, over switches that do unicast flood control or which are configured to ignore bpdu's in imaginative ways. but either way it's not a DELNI any more. what i see is inevitable complexity and various different ways of layering that complexity in. the choice of per-peering VLANs represents a minimal response to the problems of shared IXP fabrics, with maximal impedance matching to the PNI's that inevitably follow successful shared-port peerings.