Subject: Re: Maximum number of FDDI cards in an AGS+
In-Reply-To: <"3880 Sun Nov 15 14:25:51 1992"@bnr.ca> ; from "Robert" at Nov 15, 92 2:27 pm
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Date: 17 Nov 92 10:22:39 CST
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> Greetings,
> We have a number of AGS+ routers equipped with FDDI cards in our shop,
> and an ongoing discussion with Cisco about the number of cards we can
> put in one box using cBus CTL I. Anybody experiencing any performance limitationproblems using 3 or 4 cards in one AGS+? Any information re total number of
> cards, average utilisation per FDDI interface, performance issues would be
> greatly appreciated.
> Thanks,
> Robert Eros, WAN analyst, Information Technology, BNR Ottawa.
>
Robert,
We (Cray) had been running an AGS+ w/Cbus CTl I, 2 FDDI and MEC-6
for a couple of years and decided to add a third FDDI to the AGS+. Sounded
relatively simple but we ran into numerous problems. Some were related to
9.0 (also upgraded CSC3 to CSC4), some w/FDDI controllers and some
with Cbus controllers. I wasn't the primary person responsible for this
upgrade and making it all work but I provided support (technical, FDDI,
emotional) to the person who was. I can't detail all of the problems for
you but one major one was the dropping of packets by an FDDI interface when
trying to use NFS between 2 Crays attached to FDDI rings seperated by the
AGS+. The "old FDDI" was not able to handle bursts of packets coming from
the Cray. cisco's new FDDI, FCIT/FDDI-T, was able to handle these bursts.
The Cbus II with lots more buffers also helped out.
I'm sure your main concern is what will work; here's what we have
today:
fddihub1 uptime is 1 week, 19 hours, 9 minutes
System restarted by bus error at PC 0xAD242, address 0xD0D0D1A
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
(I guess all is not well!)
Running default software
CSC4 (68040) processor with 16384K bytes of memory.
X.25 software.
Bridging software.
1 cBus controller.
1 MEC controller (6 Ethernet).
Environmental Controller.
6 Ethernet/IEEE 802.3 interface.
3 FDDI network interface.
64K bytes of multibus memory.
64K bytes of non-volatile configuration memory.
Configuration register is 0x101
fddihub1>sh cont cbus
cBus 0, controller type 6.0, microcode version 130.2
512 Kbytes of main memory, 128 Kbytes cache memory