Re: [tkined] tkined 1.4.10 and cisco E1 interfaces

Alexios Zavras (zvr@hermes.aueb.gr)
Sun, 2 May 1999 18:25:11 +0300 (EET DST)

Mark J Elkins wrote [edited]:
> Hi - I'm running TKINED 1.4.10 (as from Turbolinux-3.4.0). I have a
> Channelised E1 card in my 3640 router with interfaces named as...
> controller E1 1/0
> channel-group 0 timeslots 1-2
[...]
> interface Serial1/0:0
> ip address ?????????????
> bandwidth 128
[...]
> Click on 'SMTP Monitor' and 'Interface load' brings up the graphs for
> the normal interfaces just fine - but I don't get to see the Serial
> lines such as "Serial1/0:1"

I am not 100% sure it's the same problem, but this seems like
the notorious Cisco bug (*ahem* "limitation") that you can not
get SNMP data from individual sub-interfaces.

We used to have this problem in FrameRelay a couple of years ago
and we still have for ATM connections now. I haven't got a channelized
E1 card to test.

The situation is actually worse, since some parts know about
sub-interfaces and function ok (eg. querying by command line
on cisco) but others don't (eg. SNMP queries or Netflow statistics)
and therefore can provide only aggregate data for all sub-interfaces.
As far as I can see, the information must be stored using
two different MIBs inside these boxes, and each part knows
only about one. Try to develop a general accounting framework with this...

Welcome to the wonderful world of Cisco software.
What IOS do you run on the router ? If you're feeling adventurous,
you could try 12.0.2-XE1 (way experimental :-), which supposedly
fixes these capabilities for ATM links (and maybe for E1).
It might work, depending on your configuration (interface cards,
memory, protocols you want to run). I know of an instance
where it runs fine and of another where it consumed 57Mbytes
of free space in less than 9 hours. In any case, the IOS "train"
(== series of releases) which you should look into is the one
called "T" (and of which XE1 are pre-releases). By summer
(July or September, depending on who you ask) the releases should
merge towards a new train, called "S".

Good luck -- you're gonna need it ! :-)

-- zvr --
ps. I should mention another notorious Cisco b*g. In some cases
when you ask for a table (such as the routing entries) by using
SNMPv2 commands (not getting it row-by-row) the process that
builds the table runs with the wrong priority on the router,
consuming the 99% of the CPU, which means that it can no longer
process any packets (nor respond to the query) -- crash.
Just be *very* careful.
-- zvr --
+---------------------------+ Alexios Zavras (-zvr-)
| H eytyxia den exei enoxes | zvr@aueb.gr
+-----------------------zvr-+

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