I hate to whip a dead horse, but letting stuff like this pass as accepted is probably not the best thing...

<jhall@rex.isdn.net> writes:

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,

Actually, its in 11.0, which is now production software, and i *think* it might even have made it into 10.x. No confederations AFAIK.

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.

I you mean the trait of using classfull mask defaults for route aggregation, yes that is/was an issue. I think 11.0 has a switch to turn that off now though (if not production, one of the workspaces). Its not a major issue really, as this can easily be accomplished with policy filters, which is how we do it. I would say this is the preferable way to do it, as it isolates bogus IGP information and makes troubleshooting much easier.

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.

This is false. I used to believe this too, and am quite familiar with the MIBs as a result. But then there is TI scripting, and it made life much simpler (at least, it made wfIpBaseRtEntry.7.* much easier to type). The ip commands in 10.x also make this easier. Of course, this is all if you're a die-hard CLI fan.

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.

Can't speak for this, as i do local logging, not syslog. However, we currently have several Bay boxes with full internet routes and multiple peers, and the only problem i've had recently is from a Cisco peer feeding me bad announcements.

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

NTP client is in 11.0, though not server.

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.

We have actually seen quite a bit of improvement (and i'll be the first to admit, there was a lot of room for it). However, i'm not sure i agree with your statement about 'full routing'. We are running BGP, RIP, and OSPF all here, in various nodes, without serious problems. True, you do need to have a good understanding of accept/announce policies, but i find the performance/capability more than acceptable. - jeremy // Jeremy Hinton Visionary Systems, Inc. // jgh@visi.net http://www.visi.net // Network Engineer Newport News, VA // A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men