Mailing List Archive: Optical bypass switches (Re: MAE-East still no generator)

>This is funny, I did loose my IBGP peers, maybe the MFS provided
>IDSU is on AC power... -:)

It wouldn't hurt to check. When doing a physical check of our facilities
in the past, we've discovered MFS had installed some AC powered equipment
on our rack. Other telco's have done the same thing. If you have an
AC outlet too close to your rack, I've noticed even the telco techs
don't like messing with DC power and plug things into the wall.

A thought I just had. How many folks have optical bypass switches on
their fddi connections? If a enough providers' equipment fail without
bypassing, the ring can get partitioned into different sections which
might explain some of this. Supposedly DRA's router is plugged into
the gigaswitch, but I don't have a gigaswitch manual to check what
happens with ring partitions.
--
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
Affiliation given for identification not representation
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> A thought I just had. How many folks have optical bypass switches on
> their fddi connections? If a enough providers' equipment fail without
> bypassing, the ring can get partitioned into different sections which
> might explain some of this. Supposedly DRA's router is plugged into
> the gigaswitch, but I don't have a gigaswitch manual to check what
> happens with ring partitions.

Perhaps we're getting off of the nanog topical area here, but...
To the best of my knowledge, the fddi ring at mae-east is a
concentrator type ring, a to m / b to m type of thing... instead
of a fddi trunk type of ring with a to b and b to a.
MFS may have a number of concentrators hanging off of the Gigaswitch.

One of the nice things about a concentrated ring, if you will, is
that individual ports can come up and down... the ring transitions,
but when a node or nodes go down, the ring doesn't partition.

One note of humor about optical bypasses... although I've never used
them, I'm told they're less reliable than most fddi cards -- they end
up breaking and causing more problems then if you lived without them. =-)

davec

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