On Thu, 7 May 1998 18:45:46 -0700 (PDT) "Jason L. Weisberger" <jweis@softaware.com> wrote:
On Thu, 7 May 1998, Karl Denninger wrote:
Well, the GRF has its good and bad points. I've tested one rather extensively, although I admit it was some time (~8-9 months) ago.
I've been rather upset with Ascend over their lack of reaction to the bug in the Pipe 150 that had it publishing ARP statments for every ip address that went by its ethernet interface. Have you found their other products to be better supported and safer to fire and forget?
AFAIK there is no such thing as a PIPE-150, and if you have proxy arp switched on then you might see this behavour. You did read the manual ? :-) I use the GRF-400 and it works well, Although I agree that Ascends current support management is completely broken. As for Ethernet, in my experience if you push anything near to 100M you should really spend the extra cash on FDDI, it works far better. The POS card for the GRF works excellently, you can use it as a frame relay switch, however Ascend manage to do stupid things like break your ability to restrict AS annoucements via AS path. sigh. For ethernet server farms I use Xylans Omniswitch which I've yet ever to have a problem with, other than they charge for software updates. I also use the Xylan as an FDDI switch and again it works incredibly well. Ascend's remote access division majorly screwed up with the TNT which caused a knock on effect to its other remote access products I do believe they have learned the lesson on that. But they still lack a good method of reporting problems and releasing tested code. I've also used BSD PC's [and orginally NetBSD/sparc] at Demon we had 2 lines to Sprint using Morningstar Snaplinks to drive them and GateD 3.4 and 3.5 on a 32M Sparc IPX :-). sl-dc-4 used to be an AGS, our PC performed better than that pile of junk! :-) If you are on a budget then buy a couple of pentiums and a copy of BSDI, BSDI works great as a router / server or a workstation. PC's are fine up to E1 speed, after that you loose, there are no good E3/DS-3 cards for a PC. BSDI have good support for a lot of strange devices including the RISCOM N2 serial card. [Where is the E1 card Ascend?] I've never used Cisco as a backbone router, used them for remote access and CPE and they do work well for that. I simply disagree that the Internet is built on Cisco and whilst they maintain that I won't purchase their equipment. Bay is a total nightmare, we have 2 Bay Networks connected customers, one never made their machine talk to our FR switch, the other had Bay at his site for 4 days whilst they tried to figure out a config. Regards, Neil. -- Neil J. McRae. Alive and Kicking. neil@DOMINO.ORG NetBSD-1.3.1 released! ftp://ftp.uk.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD Free the daemon in your <A HREF="http://www.NetBSD.ORG/">computer!</A>