Jeremy, I would have to strongly disagree with you on many of your points below: First I have had experience running a 200 router network, made fully of Bay BCN/BNX's. This network was running OSPF, with several areas, and route aggregation. When the network was first implemented, we had some problems, however Bay was quick to resolve them. In addition, I have seen several case of Bay routers BGP peering, with Cisco's. This is a fairly straight forward thing to do (now), and Bay could probably give you a white paper describing any potential differences they have with Cisco. As for not supporting SNMP, that is simply crap, I have written SNMP code to pull many thousand entry route tables, and while this did have performance implications, most routers have performance implications when doing lot's of SNMP. I would throw away site manager (Bay's SNMP Manager), and learn the MIB if I had a large Bay network. Yes I would agree you have to have a good understanding of the MIB. But, I would add that with a Cisco you have to have a good understanding of IOS. Generally, I think Cisco has a stronger software platform, Bay a stronger hardware platform, but both are viable options, depending on your environment. Could you be running some 5.xx series code? Haven't we beat this Bay/Cisco thing to death yet... Thanks. David Whipple.

---------- From: Mr. Jeremy Hall[SMTP:jhall@rex.isdn.net] Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 1996 3:39 AM To: alex@relcom.eu.net Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: You are right [was Re: Ungodly packet loss rates]

well if you're going to compare ciscos and bay networks routers, consider that Bay networks supports Rip, OSPF, BGP, and EGP. They do *NOT* support communities in their production software, and they have *NO* intentions of *EVER* supporting confederations. In adition, to handle subnets, where you want the thing to summarise a subnet into a classful route, the Bay's solution is to drop the route entirely. They also don't seem to understand how to aggregate routes. Their solution there is also to drop the route. They do not appear to have the option to announce the aggregate with the routes. They also do not appear to have the option of aggregating since the option they provide does not work. Their SNMP agent only works on a few platforms, and in order to adequately solve a routing problem, you need to have a *GOOD* understanding of the MIB. The last time I enabled syslog on the box, the router reloaded several times within a 5 hour period, causing instability in our small network, small meaning under 200 routes. I have fought with these things for 3 years now and haven't seen much improvements. They have been promising NTP support for quite some time now, since their routers don't have a battery-powered clock. Maybe the reason they can switch packets faster and more reliably than ciscos is because they are unable to be placed in a situation to really test their skills. The items I have shown here make it VERRY difficult to allow one of these things to perform with full routing because you cannot determine what it will do. -- ------------------------------------------- | Jeremy Hall Network Engineer | | ISDN-Net, Inc Office +1-615-371-1625 | | Nashville, TN and the southeast USA | | jhall@isdn.net Pager +1-615-702-0750 | -------------------------------------------