[c-nsp] Wanted: Picture of working 7609 - Reward if found

[Alex Rubenstein]

(me.lurking = false)


> > I was wondering if people could comment on the quality
> > issues around the 7609. We seem to have a large number of
> > problems with these boxes, some software, a lot hardware
> > issues, DOA, a lot of hardware failures, random cards rebooting.
>
> We have had some hardware issues as well on ours, but the software
> issues has been worse. Sometimes, you could count the number of
> days with out a IOS-problem in days, not weeks or months. We
> are so far using the 12.1E train (nowadays 12.1(20)E3), the
> 12.2SX seams a bit to scary yet.

I agree with the assessment of 12.1E vs. 12.2SX.

My further comments should be qualified with the statement that we run all
6509 sup2/msfc2/pfc2, but as you know, the differences are very minute.

Our success with these boxes for ourselves, and a few key clients, have
been substantially better, it sounds. 12.1.20E3 and its immediate
predecessor have been very stable for us. On several (5 or 7 or so) boxes
running 12.1.20E3, with mild feature use (ISIS, BGP, MPLS, occasional
FlexWAN, a some OSM, NetFlow) have been running pretty much rock solid.
Most, if not all, of them have uptimes equal to the amount of time they
have been last reloaded for a code upgrade.

Don't get me wrong -- I am not calling you crazy, my guess is that we do
different things with our boxes :)


> I'm not very impressed by the feature set, at least not in 12.1E.
> All interesting features is first introduced in 12.0S on the GSR,
> then on 12.0S/12.2S on 72/7500 and a looong time later *maybe*
> on the 7600.

I agree here, there are many key features that are very nifty in 12.2T and
12.3T that would be nice to have.


> Being frankly, if I would redo the choice today, I would have chosen
> a smaller GSR or some other vendors equipment instead of the 7600.

I can't speak to that, having never used a GSR (we use Juniper M in
positions where we need traditional routers). However, it seems to me that
there is a distinct performance difference between the GSR and MSFC.


> > We have less than 20 and a considerable larger amount of
> > 7200 and 7500 routers and we haven't seen anywhere near
> > the same number of issues with those platforms [particularly
> > on the hardware side] that we see with the 7609. We also use
> > 6509's and again these seem to be more robust. Any feedback
> > appreciated.

I wrote the above without seeing this. I can't speak to the 7600.


> We have had our shared deal with 7200 as well. We were unlucky
> to get a lot of faulty NPE-400's (some memory timing problems),
> and Cisco had to replace every single NPE in the network.
> Speaking of NPE's, the NSE-1 tops out as the worst product ever
> released. We never (nor Cisco) found an IOS that worked stable
> on those with the PXF enabled....

12.3 mainline for the NSE-1 works well for us. But, remember, unless you
are using the NSE for it's purpose (essentially NAT and some other wierd
stuff), it is really a NPE-300.




-- Alex Rubenstein, AR97, K2AHR, alex at nac.net, latency, Al Reuben --
--    Net Access Corporation, 800-NET-ME-36, http://www.nac.net   --