Sean, Not at all. Modern 7200-series routers, with newer NPE's and more memory can easily handle full tables today, and into the future. Therefore, we don't need to through away 7200s. However, should we all be held hostage to those unwilling to upgrade their existing routers, and perhaps eventually, upgrade to new routers? Routers are, basically, specialized computing devices, with fairly short lives, compared to things like household appliances, arc welders, or phone booths. This is reflected in their shorter depreciation schedules. As the upgrades that extend the life of the routers, in dealing with larger routing tables, are also the cheapest - i.e. RAM, controlling routing table size to prevent vast expenditures of money to replace existing routers simply doesn't hold water. The Internet did not collapse on the day that 2501s became incapable of handling a full view of the routing table. There was little gnashing of teeth or rending of garments when it happened. That is a lesson well remembered. - Daniel Golding
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Sean M. Doran Sent: Friday, September 28, 2001 5:09 PM To: bortzmeyer@gitoyen.net; jtk@titania.net; vbono@vinny.org Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: The Gorgon's Knot. Was: Re: Verio Peering Question
| When Sprint was filtering there was a demonstrable need based on the 64meg | limit that | mainstream routers had for memory at the time. I do not see that there is | any such physical | limitation today and I guarentee that the router vendors (all two of them) | have learned the lesson | of not including enough address lines on the equipment to allow for easy | memory upgrades.
So we should throw away all the 7200s and similar routers today because they are in the way of growing numbers of long prefixes, replacing them with new routers manufactured since the time of the above-mentioned lesson? And when shall we throw away the 12000s and similar routers (or components thereof) because they are underpowered in the face of routing-table growth, compared to well-established alternatives?
Incidentally, the lesson learned was that sheer storage AMOUNT is only a (perhaps small) part of the problem, compared to the processing necessary to use that storage in support of dynamic routing (in terms of CPU and in terms of accesses to that memory).
Sean.