Re: Optical bypass switches (Re: MAE-East still no generator)

[Dave Curado <dcurado () neteng nis newscorp com>]

> A thought I just had.  How many folks have optical bypass switches on
> their fddi connections?  If a enough providers' equipment fail without
> bypassing, the ring can get partitioned into different sections which
> might explain some of this.  Supposedly DRA's router is plugged into
> the gigaswitch, but I don't have a gigaswitch manual to check what
> happens with ring partitions.

Perhaps we're getting off of the nanog topical area here, but...
To the best of my knowledge, the fddi ring at mae-east is a
concentrator type ring, a to m / b to m type of thing... instead
of a fddi trunk type of ring with a to b and b to a.  
MFS may have a number of concentrators hanging off of the Gigaswitch.

One of the nice things about a concentrated ring, if you will, is
that individual ports can come up and down... the ring transitions, 
but when a node or nodes go down, the ring doesn't partition.

One note of humor about optical bypasses... although I've never used
them, I'm told they're less reliable than most fddi cards -- they end
up breaking and causing more problems then if you lived without them. =-)

davec

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