[c-nsp] Feature request

[Brett Frankenberger]

christopher.a.kane wrote:
>Since dependency upon network availability, IRT revenue, never
>decreases....it seems more and more often people like to schedule
>complete downtime maintenance windows to perform seemingly benign
>tasks. We often have folks requesting we route traffic away from a
>device that we intend to perform maintenance on even if it's as simple
>as plugging in a new, non-production T1 or changing the speed/duplex
>settings on a port that resides on a different module and has nothing
>to do with their production route. Erring this much on the side of
>caution seems like a sledgehammer approach. I'd much rather be able to
>reassure folks that certain tasks can be performed without impact to
>traffic flow. But over the years...too many bugs or mishaps such as
>configuration errors or a field engineer sneezing on a router causes
>said router to reload. You want a true example? How about inserting a
>flash card into a box that shot CPU utilization up to
>95% and caused packet loss.

So if I understand correctly, you want to route all traffic away from a
switch while you change the duplex on a port and then route traffic
back through that switch, to mitigate against the risk of unexpected
consequences from the duplex change.

For this to make sense, the mechanism/process for rerouting the traffic
would have to be less risky than the mechanism/process for changing a
duplex setting.  It seems to me that the likelyhood of that being the
case is essentially zero.

Put another way: it sounds like you are asking for a fix that is almost
certain to be worse than the problem.

     -- Brett