Re: sell shell accounts?

["Randolph C. Nicklas" <rcn () mci net>]

Karl,

We have been running NetStars in the vBNS for ~1 year. While the
h/w is impressive, the GigaRouter s/w still aspires to the level
of Cisco's. And no, I don't mean gated. As to your comment
"(presuming the BGP issues get completely resolved)."--we have
yet to take full routing in our production routers, but we are
close. We have had some problems with the RMS (486 running BSDI &
gated) being able to distrubute the forwarding table to the 
GigaRouter linecards (FDDI, ATM/OC-3c, & HiPPI) during start-up.
New s/w addresses this pacing issue, and we expect to deploy
BGP on our GigaRouters very soon. OSPF works very well on these
boxes, and considering that when the NetStars were first deployed
everything was static, we have made some progress :) Also, we
look forward to getting our hands on some ATM/OC-12c cards this
fall.

The NetStar is an interesting router that has made a lot of progress,
and I hope they stay in the race. 

                                                Regards,
                                                Randy

On Fri, 19 Jul 1996, Karl Denninger, MCSNet wrote:

> > Nope, remember - there is no magic.  Any mesh of PVCs that one makes
> > over a switched network must reflect the toplogy of that network, and
> > one can set up a matching set of active routing sessions and route
> > weights which will cause traffic to flow the same way.
> >
> > Yes, the switches are a bit faster and have less to do. Data moves through 
> > them in a few ms less per point.  But as you said (and as I said in our
> > discussion in NYC), relative to any distance, the speed of light guarantees 
> > that you won't notice the difference.
> >
> > The question is:  Will there be routers available that can make IP
> > routing decisions based on 40-60kroutes and move 2-3 OC3s worth of 
> > bidirectional traffic?  The building of the configs to have a routed
> > network work the same as a switched ATM one can be automated, but it's
> > true that it *can be* easier to see what's going on in a large-scale 
> > switched network.
> >
> > Avi
>
> Uh, yes.  Like today.
>
> See NetStar (recently acquired by ASCEND).
>
> Their hardware does nothing *slower* than DS-3 right now, and updates the
> route forwarding table 20x/second. :-)
>
> This thing is a monster, and will make the so-called "state of the art"
> 7513s look like dogmeat when in full production (presuming the BGP issues
> get completely resolved).
>
> Coming soon to a network near you.
>
> --
> --
> Karl Denninger (karl () MCS Net)| MCSNet - The Finest Internet Connectivity
> http://www.mcs.net/~karl     | T1 from $600 monthly; speeds to DS-3 available
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
Randolph C. Nicklas                     MCI Telecommunications
vBNS Engineering                        2100 Reston Parkway
Phone: 703.715.7099                     Reston, VA 22091
Fax: 703.715.7066                       Pager: 1-800-SKY-8888 PIN 902418


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