Re: 3Com routers

[Kevin Hoadley kevin@localhost]

>  * We have got an offer for 3Com NETBuilder II routers. They seem to be quite
>  * cheap, but I do not have any experience with them.
>  * 
>  * If you have such a router, could you please write me your experience
>  * with them, especially compared to CISCO router? Can it really support
>  * BGP 4 routing protocol and RFC877 encapsulation?
>  *
>Although I haven't used one myself I know there are 3coms in use doing
>RFC877 (now revised as RFC1356) and they also have participated in 
>the BGP4 trials and have a version of BGP4 that will talk to the cisco
>implementation 

There are a couple of NBII's on the JANET-IP service running RFC877 - they
generally work OK though there have been some problems with tunnels not
being cleared properly (between one of the 3Com's and a backbone cisco).
The jury is still out on this one ... if you want more details you could
try Malcolm Ray at the University of Westminster (malcolmr@localhost)

We got a very early version of 3Com's BGP4 that seemed to have slipped in
by mistake when we field tested their HSSI boards - we never got this
going though to be fair we hardly tried very hard ! We were promised some
months ago a 'working' copy of BGP4 - this hasn't materialised yet, though
there is some confusion here as according to the salesmen BGP4 is out and
shipping in v6.2 of their software as a full service product.

>I have no idea of performance issues, although there are I believe
>3coms (not usre if are NETbuilder IIs though) within the SuperJANET
>network so perhaps they can help or comparability with a cisco
>sorry.

A stack of NBII's should be delivered for SuperJANET next week. These
will sit on the SMDS - performance tests on these (HSSI boards) showed
no significant difference in performance between NBII's, ciscos (AGS+/4)
and Wellfleet (BLN) - they were all capable of driving an E3 SMDS link
(access class 4 - after overheads 25Mb/s) flat out (but so they should !).

Hope this helps

Kevin Hoadley, JIPS NOSC.