[tech] Re: [ucc] WAIX is back

[David Luyer]

> Yeah, I'm advertising the private address space to WAIX 
> from a zebra. Seems to work pretty well. Toivo is a RIP 
> only man and didn't want me to turn on BGP for muchacho.

I don't think I have to point out popular attitudes towards
RIP... OSPF really isn't that hard (ok, a lot of people
have trouble remembering the rules, but the rules are
there and if you apply them it all works).  And if
OSPF is too hard, ISIS... but you'll never get the Bays
to support it, so you'd have to put the Bays on a
dedicated VLAN that has RIP on it.  It's a good idea
anyway since Bays aren't much good with firewalling
and you should be firewalling between the dialins
and the backbone (for safety in both directions,
eg, so someone on tartarus can't try to connect to
a student's machine with well-known trojan ports).

> The most pain is our Bay accelar; afraid to touch the 
> config as it has been stable for at least 3 months! 
> The bloody thing has repeatedly failed, each time with 
> a plague of ports slowly failing over time.

It was a pain when I was there too.  I'd be seriously
considering moving the whole campus onto VLAN trunk
ports to a core router, if not the 7500 then a 7401
(with onboard dual GigE, and put the ATM PA in the
single PA slot).  Then repeat the same at QEII with
a single modern router (2650?) and a VLAN switch.

You'd end up with a faster and more manageable network
where your only care is managing the trunks appropriately
should any of them become congested.

> Has anyone used Foundry or Extreme? I'd love to tell 
> you guys what our testing of Foundry stuff was like, 
> but it's NDAed :-) (Was amazed I had to sign an NDA 
> just to get a test router.)

I've not used either of them, but I've heard positive
feedback about Extreme and negative feedback about
Foundry.  Either way, I'm not likely to even try
anything other than Cisco or Juniper - I'm a bigot.

David.