Re: Anyone Deployed Ascend's GRF IP Switch?
AGIS had about 40 of them in the last I knew. http://www.agis.net/press25.html. I know from experience that there are some quirks to gated, but as far as power goes the GRF munches Ciscos. Ciscos are much easier to work with though. One big down point on the GRF's imho is that in order to change anything with them you have to run a gdcreconfig, which stops and starts gated, effectively taking down the routing for a period of time, whereas you can add/remove a static route from a cisco and not bring down the routing. GRF's also take about 5-10 minutes to reboot, which can be annoying. On the other hand it's quite easy to manage users and such with the GRF's , as they are BSD based. Setting up authentication like Radius and SecurID is quite simple as well. Then there are the advantages of being able to use tools like nslookup and whois without having to open a shell somewhere. Very nice while troubleshooting. So, as with any product comparison there are pros and cons to both. I think that Cisco's are great, as I'm not a Unix/GateD guru, but I think that the Ascends have a bit more power to them and will be able to better handle the growing routing table. Just my 2 cents. --Damon
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We are in the development phase of engineering the deployment of approximately 60 POPs throughout the US. Our 'standard' configuration is normally based upon cisco equipment and more often than not consists of a 7513 connected to a Catalyst 5000/5500 via FDDI with the various internal LAN segments switched from there via FD 100BaseTX.
We've begun to explore the viability of deploying the GRF for several reasons, not the least of which is cost and performance. Given (and taken with a grain of salt) the apparent performance differential between the cisco 7513 and the Ascend GRF (the GRF outperforms the 7513 substantially in our tests,) my concerns are more operations-related.
The GRF DOES support the 'full' implementation (including extensions) of BGP4 and the other 'vanilla' TCP services that you'd come to expect from a router (er, layer 3 switch?) of this caliber. Since it's NOT a cisco, we'd have to deviate and not utilize EIGRP as our IGP of choice, and deploy OSPF which poses its own set of issues.
SO, the bottom line...has anyone else deployed multiple GRF400's with success. Ascend will tell you that UUNET has deployed (or is going to) a hundred or so. I want to talk to people USING the technology, not thinking about it.
Your comments and opinions are welcomed.
TIA,
Christofer Hoff
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,,, (o-o) ------.oOO--(_)--OOo.--------------------------------- Christofer L. Hoff \ No true genius is Chief Nerd, \ possible without a NodeWarrior Networks, Inc \ little intelligent \ madness! hoff@nodewarrior.net \ http://www.nodewarrior.net \ -Peter Uberoth "Nuthin' but Net!" \ ------------------------------------------------------ 310.568.1700 vox - 310.568.4766 fax
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Damon Hammis Email: damonh@netrex.com Network Engineer URL: http://www.netrex.com Netrex, Inc. Voice: 248-352-9643 3000 Town Center, Suite 1100 FAX: 248-352-2375 Southfield, MI 48075 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Hard work is for people short on talent" ============================== ISP Mailing List ============================== Email ``unsubscribe'' to inet-access-request@earth.com to be removed. Don't post messages that just say ``me too''. ----- End of forwarded message from Damon Hammis ----- -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Damon Hammis Email: damonh@netrex.com Network Engineer URL: http://www.netrex.com Netrex, Inc. Voice: 248-352-9643 3000 Town Center, Suite 1100 FAX: 248-352-2375 Southfield, MI 48075 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Hard work is for people short on talent"
On Mon, 1 Sep 1997, Damon Hammis wrote:
Ciscos are much easier to work with though.
No way, some say the GRF is MUCH easier to work with. I admit if all you know is cisco, it may be easier to work with cisco. I can config both vary well, and I find the GRF easier to work with now that I have had some time with them.
One big down point on the GRF's imho is that in order to change anything with them you have to run a gdcreconfig, which stops and starts gated, effectively taking down the routing for a period of time, whereas you can add/remove a static route from a cisco and not bring down the routing.
Back the truck up, where did you get this? If I want to change gated.conf I need to run gdc reconfig after I am done. This DOES NOT restart gated. If you want to restart gatec then do a gdc restart or gdc stop then gdc start. I would suggest you work with the GRF and then say what it can or cant do. It would be almost impossible to work with a box that would restart every time you wanted to change the configs. Also I know someone is going to say that you cant reset a single peer on a GRF, but sorry Ascend fixed that.
GRF's also take about 5-10 minutes to reboot, which can be annoying.
Hello? How many of them have you rebooted? Ok, I just rebooted rt3.ATL.netrail.net and it took 139 seconds to come back up. That is 2.316 min. Ok, not lets try a cold start..... 127 seconds or 2.116 min. Ok, do you now want me to run it on my cisco? :-) Look, I will be the first to say that GRF has problem. Just call up Ascend, I yell more then most because I have a lot of experience with gated on my old PC routers. Ascend has fixed a large number of problems. There will be more, just like cisco will have more problem. Ascend has as box that is vary good, please look at the box before you slam it in public.
On the other hand it's quite easy to manage users and such with the GRF's , as they are BSD based. Setting up authentication like Radius and SecurID is quite simple as well.
Then there are the advantages of being able to use tools like nslookup and whois without having to open a shell somewhere. Very nice while troubleshooting.
So, as with any product comparison there are pros and cons to both. I think that Cisco's are great, as I'm not a Unix/GateD guru, but I think that the Ascends have a bit more power to them and will be able to better handle the growing routing table.
Yes they have a lot more power to them.
Just my 2 cents.
P.S. I do not work or speak for Ascend, I am just a happy customer that has been working with the box for over a year. Nathan Stratton President, CTO, NetRail,Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phone (888)NetRail NetRail, Inc. Fax (404)522-1939 230 Peachtree Suite 500 WWW http://www.netrail.net/ Atlanta, GA 30303 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. - Psalm 33:16
--Damon
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We are in the development phase of engineering the deployment of approximately 60 POPs throughout the US. Our 'standard' configuration is normally based upon cisco equipment and more often than not consists of a 7513 connected to a Catalyst 5000/5500 via FDDI with the various internal LAN segments switched from there via FD 100BaseTX.
We've begun to explore the viability of deploying the GRF for several reasons, not the least of which is cost and performance. Given (and taken with a grain of salt) the apparent performance differential between the cisco 7513 and the Ascend GRF (the GRF outperforms the 7513 substantially in our tests,) my concerns are more operations-related.
The GRF DOES support the 'full' implementation (including extensions) of BGP4 and the other 'vanilla' TCP services that you'd come to expect from a router (er, layer 3 switch?) of this caliber. Since it's NOT a cisco, we'd have to deviate and not utilize EIGRP as our IGP of choice, and deploy OSPF which poses its own set of issues.
SO, the bottom line...has anyone else deployed multiple GRF400's with success. Ascend will tell you that UUNET has deployed (or is going to) a hundred or so. I want to talk to people USING the technology, not thinking about it.
Your comments and opinions are welcomed.
TIA,
Christofer Hoff
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,,, (o-o) ------.oOO--(_)--OOo.--------------------------------- Christofer L. Hoff \ No true genius is Chief Nerd, \ possible without a NodeWarrior Networks, Inc \ little intelligent \ madness! hoff@nodewarrior.net \ http://www.nodewarrior.net \ -Peter Uberoth "Nuthin' but Net!" \ ------------------------------------------------------ 310.568.1700 vox - 310.568.4766 fax
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Damon Hammis Email: damonh@netrex.com Network Engineer URL: http://www.netrex.com Netrex, Inc. Voice: 248-352-9643 3000 Town Center, Suite 1100 FAX: 248-352-2375 Southfield, MI 48075 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Hard work is for people short on talent"
============================== ISP Mailing List ============================== Email ``unsubscribe'' to inet-access-request@earth.com to be removed. Don't post messages that just say ``me too''.
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-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Damon Hammis Email: damonh@netrex.com Network Engineer URL: http://www.netrex.com Netrex, Inc. Voice: 248-352-9643 3000 Town Center, Suite 1100 FAX: 248-352-2375 Southfield, MI 48075 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Hard work is for people short on talent"
Hello? How many of them have you rebooted? Ok, I just rebooted rt3.ATL.netrail.net and it took 139 seconds to come back up. That is 2.316 min. Ok, not lets try a cold start..... 127 seconds or 2.116 min. Ok, do you now want me to run it on my cisco? :-)
Just curious, what is the size of the config file on your box? --Jessica
On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Jessica Yu wrote:
Just curious, what is the size of the config file on your box?
It is not very large 169 lines on rt3.ATL. The size of the the gated file should not slow down the router. On rt2.DCA (or MAE-East router) the config is 458 lines and it takes the same time to load. Nathan Stratton President, CTO, NetRail,Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phone (888)NetRail NetRail, Inc. Fax (404)522-1939 230 Peachtree Suite 500 WWW http://www.netrail.net/ Atlanta, GA 30303 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. - Psalm 33:16
Just curious, what is the size of the config file on your box?
It is not very large 169 lines on rt3.ATL. The size of the the gated file should not slow down the router. On rt2.DCA (or MAE-East router) the config is 458 lines and it takes the same time to load.
Unless you have other data to support, the fact that a box takes almost the same amount of time to load a 458 line config as a 169 liner does not at all lead to your conclusion above. Try to load a config file of size in MGs and see if it increases the loading period. (BTW, in case you wonder, there are providers who have such large configuration files running on routers.) --jessica
On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Jessica Yu wrote:
Just curious, what is the size of the config file on your box?
It is not very large 169 lines on rt3.ATL. The size of the the gated file should not slow down the router. On rt2.DCA (or MAE-East router) the config is 458 lines and it takes the same time to load.
Unless you have other data to support, the fact that a box takes almost the same amount of time to load a 458 line config as a 169 liner does not at all lead to your conclusion above. Try to load a config file of size in MGs and see if it increases the loading period.
(BTW, in case you wonder, there are providers who have such large configuration files running on routers.)
Ah, I would like to see that. The largest gated file we have had was a little over 2000 lines. There are many things you can do to make the file smaller. I find it hard to beleave you can have a gated file longer then a few thousands lines that can not be compressed. Nathan Stratton President, CTO, NetRail,Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phone (888)NetRail NetRail, Inc. Fax (404)522-1939 230 Peachtree Suite 500 WWW http://www.netrail.net/ Atlanta, GA 30303 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. - Psalm 33:16
From: Nathan Stratton <nathan@netrail.net> Subject: Re: Anyone Deployed Ascend's GRF IP Switch?
Ah, I would like to see that. The largest gated file we have had was a little over 2000 lines. There are many things you can do to make the file smaller. I find it hard to beleave you can have a gated file longer then a few thousands lines that can not be compressed.
Believe it. Three words: Per prefix policy.. And yes, it does have a signifigant effect on time to full reachability of any router. RobS
On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Rob Skrobola wrote:
Believe it. Three words: Per prefix policy.. And yes, it does have a signifigant effect on time to full reachability of any router.
We do prefix policy filtering on all our routers, and yes it will effect the time to full reachability of ANY router. What we were talking about was how long did it take for a GRF to boot up. Someone said it took 10 min or longer from a cold start for the system boot up. I agreed that the GRF did take a long time to boot, but that ascend had worked on that and it boots much faster now. Nathan Stratton President, CTO, NetRail,Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phone (888)NetRail NetRail, Inc. Fax (404)522-1939 230 Peachtree Suite 500 WWW http://www.netrail.net/ Atlanta, GA 30303 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. - Psalm 33:16
On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Nathan Stratton wrote:
On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Rob Skrobola wrote:
Believe it. Three words: Per prefix policy.. And yes, it does have a signifigant effect on time to full reachability of any router.
We do prefix policy filtering on all our routers, and yes it will effect
This, and your earlier statement about your gated.conf length does not mesh. If you are doing what Rob was talking about, _per prefix_ policy, your gated.conf will be at leat 45K lines long. -dorian
Nathan, You will believe it when you try to widen your view. Thanks and so long. --Jessica Date: Tue, 02 Sep 1997 13:27:00 -0000 To: Jessica Yu <jyy@ans.net> cc: Damon Hammis <damonh@netrex.com>, nanog@merit.edu From: Nathan Stratton <nathan@netrail.net> Subject: Re: Anyone Deployed Ascend's GRF IP Switch? Return-Path: nathan@netrail.net In-Reply-To: <199709021635.MAA10661@cannes.aa.ans.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Length: 1563 On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Jessica Yu wrote:
Just curious, what is the size of the config file on your box?
It is not very large 169 lines on rt3.ATL. The size of the the gated file should not slow down the router. On rt2.DCA (or MAE-East router) the config is 458 lines and it takes the same time to load.
Unless you have other data to support, the fact that a box takes almost the same amount of time to load a 458 line config as a 169 liner does not at all lead to your conclusion above. Try to load a config file of size in MGs and see if it increases the loading period.
(BTW, in case you wonder, there are providers who have such large configuration files running on routers.)
Ah, I would like to see that. The largest gated file we have had was a little over 2000 lines. There are many things you can do to make the file smaller. I find it hard to beleave you can have a gated file longer then a few thousands lines that can not be compressed. Nathan Stratton President, CTO, NetRail,Inc. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phone (888)NetRail NetRail, Inc. Fax (404)522-1939 230 Peachtree Suite 500 WWW http://www.netrail.net/ Atlanta, GA 30303 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength. - Psalm 33:16
GRF's also take about 5-10 minutes to reboot, which can be annoying.
Hello? How many of them have you rebooted? Ok, I just rebooted rt3.ATL.netrail.net and it took 139 seconds to come back up. That is 2.316 min. Ok, not lets try a cold start..... 127 seconds or 2.116 min. Ok, do you now want me to run it on my cisco? :-)
My 7206s reboot in well under a minute (the -p- builds fit right into bootflash, so no need for a boot-then-think-then-load-flash-then-think cycle). Once up, they transfer full routes bidirectionally with 7505s in 10-15 seconds.
Nathan Stratton President, CTO, NetRail,Inc.
FYI, Avi
One big down point on the GRF's imho is that in order to change anything with them you have to run a gdcreconfig, which stops and starts gated, effectively taking down the routing for a period of time, whereas you can add/remove a static route from a cisco and not bring down the routing.
Back the truck up, where did you get this? If I want to change gated.conf I need to run gdc reconfig after I am done. This DOES NOT restart gated. If you want to restart gatec then do a gdc restart or gdc stop then gdc start. I would suggest you work with the GRF and then say what it can or cant do. It would be almost impossible to work with a box that would restart every time you wanted to change the configs.
I seem to have made a mistake in terms here. gdcreconfig doesn't *restart* gated, but it does/did disrupt it when ran before. I haven't messed with a GRF in about 4 months or so now, so they may have changed this. I have had a couple of personal mails as well as mails to this list that have suggested this.
GRF's also take about 5-10 minutes to reboot, which can be annoying.
This was the case when I was at AGIS a few months back. This again, may have been fixed. --Damon ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Damon Hammis Email: damonh@netrex.com Network Engineer URL: http://www.netrex.com Netrex, Inc. Voice: 248-352-9643 3000 Town Center, Suite 1100 FAX: 248-352-2375 Southfield, MI 48075 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Hard work is for people short on talent"
On Thu, 4 Sep 1997 23:10:07 -0400 (EDT) Damon Hammis <damonh@netrex.com> wrote:
I seem to have made a mistake in terms here. gdcreconfig doesn't *restart* gated, but it does/did disrupt it when ran before.
I have been using gated for years now, on sparcs, PC's, BSD/OS, NetBSD, Xylan Omniswitch, Ascend-GRF, Morningstar routers and I've never had gdc reconfig cause any disruption other than when the operator misconfigured something. This is the same for any router when you reconfigure things changes happen. Regards, Neil. -- Neil J. McRae. Alive and Kicking. Domino: In the glow of the night. neil@DOMINO.ORG NetBSD/sparc: 100% SpF (Solaris protection Factor) Free the daemon in your <A HREF="http://www.NetBSD.ORG/">computer!</A>
Yo Neil! On Fri, 5 Sep 1997, Neil J. McRae wrote:
I have been using gated for years now, on sparcs, PC's, BSD/OS, NetBSD, Xylan Omniswitch, Ascend-GRF, Morningstar routers and I've never had gdc reconfig cause any disruption other than when the operator misconfigured something. This is the same for any router when you reconfigure things changes happen.
I have been using gated in production on Linux hosts. When I do a "gdc reconfig" then gated clears out the kernel routing table, then refills it. Even on my small OSPF routing tables there is a noticeable, but short, downtime. I have never seen it last long enough to drop a connection. Unless of course I made a mistake which I never do. :-) RGDS GARY --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gary E. Miller Rellim 2680 Bayshore Pkwy, #202 Mountain View, CA 94043-1009 gem@rellim.com Tel:+1(415)964-1186 Fax:+1(415)964-1176
Yo Damon! On Mon, 1 Sep 1997, Damon Hammis wrote:
One big down point on the GRF's imho is that in order to change anything with them you have to run a gdcreconfig, which stops and starts gated, effectively taking down the routing for a period of time, whereas you can add/remove a static route from a cisco and not bring down the routing.
Not so with generic gated. You can configure gated to read static routes added/deleted/changed with the ifconfig/route commands at the root command prompt. RGDS GARY --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gary E. Miller Rellim 2680 Bayshore Pkwy, #202 Mountain View, CA 94043-1009 gem@rellim.com Tel:+1(415)964-1186 Fax:+1(415)964-1176
participants (8)
-
Avi Freedman -
Damon Hammis -
Dorian R. Kim -
Gary E. Miller -
Jessica Yu -
Nathan Stratton -
Neil J. McRae -
Rob Skrobola