On Fri, 11 Jul 1997, Rodney Joffe wrote:
By the way, to expand the thread, I have the feeling that the three OC-3s from NASA Ames side to MFS all go to GIGA 1, which then has fddi loops to GIGA 2 and then to GIGA 3.
Does anyone know if this is the case?
If it is, seems that a better design would have been to route some of the OC-3s to the other GIGAs first. If 1 is down, then it can't pass traffic through to 2 and 3, so there is a single point of failure for all the switches at MFS.
The Gigaswitch constrains us to a loop-free topology, so there's no way to avoid a single point of failure in a case like this.
The Gigaswitch systems in general have been quite reliable over the last few years, modulo individual line card failures. The problems we tend to see are either load-related or caused by human error. This is the first major outage caused by a Gigaswitch itself that we've seen in a very long time.
By the way, as of yesterday it's four OC3's between Ames and MFS. Steve
Steve, Are you telling me that the GigaSwitch, unlike every other bridge since well before I became involved in networking, is incapable of spanning tree? I find that hard to believe. Could anyone on the list from DEC please confirm or deny this absurdity? Owen