NSFNET Transition Update -- MCI

Jack Waters

MCI

Table of Contents

• Slides from this Talk
• Stan Barber's Notes
• Feb 1995 NANOG Home Page

Slides

Stan Barber's Notes

The InternetMCI backbone is using DS3s and Cisco 7000s. A number of interconnect points exist and many are operational. The only one not running at all is MAE/FIX-WEST which is supposed to happen next week. JVNCnet and OARnet is not on the map yet. InternetMCI has a RIPE-181 registry for routes. Jack Waters described the transition planning. One part of this planning involved a methodology that provided for the CoREN regionals to test a variety of things. More than half of the CoREN regionals have fully transitioned at this time.

Switching performance on the Cisco 7000 is a real problem. The Fast Switching on the Cisco 7000 is ~20K pps and with the SSE at ~200K pps. The MCI network is running at ~25K pps. The SSE will stop switching during a routing configuration change that causes a bus reset or some kind of internal error. Ken Crepra of Cisco said that there are certain circustances (BGP resets and so on) where the SSE does shutdown. Phil Gross said that MCI must have the SSE running and it was fragile early one in its use. Sean Doran of Sprint remarked that Cisco has redone a number of things with the 7000 including doing prefix and mask caching and trying to make effective use of the SSE. The SSE will collapse when it receives "bad" information that is cannot rationalize. Sean remarks that Cisco has been working hard on something that is really new for the last six months and it is not really (1.5% cache missing is generally what is being observed and about 1% of the CPU is being used to fix caching in the SSE. Dennis Fergerson suggests that Cisco might have more reliable routers if they did things differently. [Elise interrupted to move the discucsion back to the transition.]

Jack showed a map with the loads on each link and a table with the top 10 routers by packets per second. Jack also showed a table on the use of the Interconnects. Jack said that the ANS/MCI Hayward connection is about 5Mb/se average and a high of 8Mb/sec. InternetMCI expects to add 7 more nodes to their network when they get budget money.