[geeks] opinion on Cabletron equipment?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, December 10, 2001 at 17:00:24 (-0600), Bill Bradford wrote: ]
> Subject: [geeks] opinion on Cabletron equipment?
>
> Anybody got any opinions, good or bad, on Cabletron equipment?  I've
> got a SmartSwitch 2200 here, and will probably put it in duty in the
> SunHELP farm once I'm able to test it and load the latest firmware,
> etc..

One of my clients has a SmartSwitch Router 8000 in their core -- or at
least they did.  They've also got an SSR 2000, and some SS2000 switch
(not a router).

>From what I understand Cabletron designed and built most fo Digital's
networking gear, and if I'm not mistaken they are now "Digital Networks"
(www.dnpg.com) now.  For example my DEC VNswitch and my DECserver are
really Cabletron gear deep underneath (though even the firmware has been
branded by Digital).

The bad news about that SSR8000 is it did die after about 5 years of
steady service and because they didn't have a support agreement it's
still dead and all we know still is it's not the power supply.  Luckily
the same brains are in the Riverstone BE2800 chassis (i.e. Riverstone
gear is also partly designed and built by Cabletron) so they were able
to just flip the configs and wires over and continue on with little
downtime.

The SS2000's SNMP agent crashes occasionally, but it keeps on switching.
It's running terribly old firmware though.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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