Re: Network Routing without Cisco or Juniper?

["Miquel van Smoorenburg" <miquels () cistron nl>]

In article <cistron.20020904074946.GA84187 () dataloss nl>,
Peter van Dijk  <peter () dataloss nl> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 03:39:25AM -0400, Deepak Jain wrote:
> [snip]
> >  Boxes like Foundry, Extreme, Redback and many others all talk BGP 
> >  (at least to a first approximation) but is their lack of use in 
> >  the core/edge/CPE a lack of scale, stability, performance or just 
> >  interest?
>
> One Dutch ISP that shall remain unnamed (and is not one I work for or
> have worked for) deployed Extreme on AMS-IX, with Extreme's BGP
> implementation.
>
> It broke horribly. The Extreme BGP implementation, instead of sending
> their peers just their own prefixes, would send each peer *all*
> prefixes and then withdraw all but their own networks. However, doing
> this with tens of peers at the same time was too much for the Extreme
> itself, which died.

OTOH, I know of other ISPs also present on the AMS-IX that have
been using Extreme switches to connect to the AMS-IX and their
upstreams without any of those problems. Their network has been
very stable for over a year now, I think. It's even a fault-tolerant
setup with VRRP.

Cistron IP is using a Foundry switch right now as core router.
You can't get a BGP/OSPF router with lots of GigE and 10/100
interfaces for that price over at C or J ..

We had some problems with instability at first, but with recent
firmware everything runs just fine.

We have several full BGP upstreams and over a hundred of AMS-IX
peers (at GigE) and it works fine.

On of the nicest things is that the box boots in 15 seconds or
so and even with >100 BGP sessions coming up simultaneously
it's still fast - a Cisco would take minutes to get all BGP
sessions up, the Foundry does it in mere seconds.

Mike.