[f-nsp] SuperX / SX800 used for routing?

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 10:08:20PM +0100, Alexander Koch wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> some ppl will surely think I am crazy to continue asking. Is anyone using
> a SuperX or SX800 for real routing, BGP and some 10G or so of traffic?
> 
> I have a few folks that say the box was giving issues and all, but is
> anyone doing this right now, and is it actually working? Also for those
> it is not / was not working out, can you please speak up and tell me?
> 
> I am of the understanding also the SX800 is what I want if I want to have
> some more traffic and a little BGP, right?

I just put down the last of my SuperX's which I was trying to do simple 
layer 3 with, too many issues.

They started out fine, but quickly started experiencing CPU spikes which 
caused mrp/vrrp to flap endlessly. After wasting a lot of time trying to 
find the cause (sniffing for bad packets hitting the cpu, protocol loops 
and the like), and playing the alphabet soup code game through 3.2 and 
even a little 4.0 (which, btw, failed catastrophically on these boxes for 
some reason or another :P) I was pretty annoyed. After they started 
experiencing what looked for all the world like cam corruption 
(blackholing packets to certain destinations when forwarded through the 
hardware but not affecting packets from the control plane itself) that 
would clear after a reboot but come back a couple of days later, that 
pretty much sealed their fate.

There are also a lot of things missing from what you might be used to from 
the old IronCore days, for example there is no way to show or clear the 
cam, no way to do cam aggregation, etc. Also they seemed to CPU switch 
packets going to BGP routes with next-hops that were recursed through BGP 
(on every version of code), which made for a really obnoxious failure mode 
to try and track down (aka "why the !&#@#$ do these Foundry's break ever 
time this one OSPF neighbor on the other side of the world flaps").

At any rate, maybe you'd have better luck if you had a *REALLY* simple 
layer 3 role for it. This was the simplest thing I could possibly come up 
with (a pair of boxes with 2 uplinks and 2 reflected ibgp feeds, default 
routes out, supporting a handful of really simple customers doing a little 
VRRP) and it didn't quite work out, so they have no business doing layer 3 
for me. But don't say I didn't warn you. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)