Cell Relay Archive

[Paul Koning <pkoning@lucent.com>]

Brian Lindsay wrote:
> 
> Does anyone know of any off-the-shelf ATM Adaptor Cards that will
> support Automatic Protection switching?  (e.g.  the ability to
> read/write K1/K2 bytes, with some kind of interupt support when a
> protection request is received).

Don't know about off the shelf NICs.  The Conexant ATM chips can
do this, so NICs built from those presumably have the capability
you describe.

It isn't clear to me whether that helps, though.  I may be missing
something, but it looked to me like a NIC that supports APS has
to have dual physical interfaces, and logic to duplicate the
data to them and select which receive path to used based on those
K1/K2 inputs.  It's tempting to do something like install two
separate NICs and switch in software between them, but it is not
at all clear that such a beast would conform.

Actually, I'd be interested in views on that.

	paul