[c-nsp] IOS reliability

[Ross Vandegrift]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 11:18:06AM +0000, A.L.M.Buxey at lboro.ac.uk wrote:
> ...and safeharbor is always a good option unless you cant use it (eg
> new a feature thats not in a safeharbor release!)

Don't put too much stock on the "Safe Harbor" label.  We have an
internal control to only run Safe Harbor code on our 6500s.  I've seen
more crashes from the 12.2S train than any other IOS, probably by an
order of magnitude.

Most of the crashes have been related to SNMP.  For many MIBs, if you
poll an object at the same time it is changed/removed, there's a race
condition somewhere that kills IOS.  It's really horrible - we're just
slowly whittling away at our SNMP view, losing management capabilites
to keep the damn things from falling over.

According to TAC, these crashes are rare and hard to trigger.  We've
done it twice in a lab and four times in production.  On the upside,
if you don't use SNMP, you're probably golden!

-- 
Ross Vandegrift
ross at kallisti.us

"If the fight gets hot, the songs get hotter.  If the going gets tough,
the songs get tougher."
	--Woody Guthrie