[10773] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: MAE West
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Owen DeLong)
Mon Jul 14 02:11:20 1997
From: owen@DeLong.SJ.CA.US (Owen DeLong)
To: feldman@mfst.com (Steve Feldman)
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 1997 22:53:45 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: rjoffe@genuity.net, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.94.970711100854.22152C-100000@zaphod> from "Steve Feldman" at Jul 11, 97 10:17:55 am
> On Fri, 11 Jul 1997, Rodney Joffe wrote:
>
> > By the way, to expand the thread, I have the feeling that the three
> > OC-3s from NASA Ames side to MFS all go to GIGA 1, which then has fddi
> > loops to GIGA 2 and then to GIGA 3.
> >
> > Does anyone know if this is the case?
> >
> > If it is, seems that a better design would have been to route some of
> > the OC-3s to the other GIGAs first. If 1 is down, then it can't pass
> > traffic through to 2 and 3, so there is a single point of failure for
> > all the switches at MFS.
>
> The Gigaswitch constrains us to a loop-free topology, so there's no way to
> avoid a single point of failure in a case like this.
>
> The Gigaswitch systems in general have been quite reliable over the last
> few years, modulo individual line card failures. The problems we tend to
> see are either load-related or caused by human error. This is the first
> major outage caused by a Gigaswitch itself that we've seen in a very
> long time.
>
> By the way, as of yesterday it's four OC3's between Ames and MFS.
> Steve
>
>
Steve,
Are you telling me that the GigaSwitch, unlike every other bridge
since well before I became involved in networking, is incapable of spanning
tree? I find that hard to believe. Could anyone on the list from DEC
please confirm or deny this absurdity?
Owen
