The Routing Over Large Clouds Mailing List Archive by date

[Ross Callon <rcallon@pobox.wellfleet.com>]

> Is a "solution" that causes routing loops when you put extra (back
> door) links in for redundancy to your building(s) that still have
> ethernet hubs wired up (and actually have occasion to use that
> redundancy) really a solution?  Or is it snake oil?

The "backdoors" in this case mean non-ATM connections between 
routers which are also connected via an ATM "cloud". One 
question comes to mind here: 

I am perhaps as much of a believer in ATM as anyone 
on this list and am a regular participant in the ATM Forum. 
However, I am also a bit "conservative", in the sense that 
I would not want to purchase a new make of car, a car that 
was based on brand new technology, or to put in some sort 
of super high tech furnace in my house, on the basis that I 
want stuff to work reliably and consistently (and boringly, 
since the "fun and excitement" of having a car or furnace 
or ... break down doesn't seem much like fun to me). Thus 
I tend to be a bit slow in adopting brand new not quite 
debugged technology into my own personal life. 

On this basis, if I were running a large corporate network
I might personally be inclined to not absolutely *rely* on
ATM working until after I had had it successfully in use for 
a while. Thus, I would be strongly tempted to maintain non-
ATM links between my routers for quite a while, likely in 
addition to (high bandwidth low latency) ATM links. 

Thus, I am inclined towards the conclusion that these so-
called "backdoor" links are likely to be very common for
quite a while.

Ross