(ASCEND) OSPF crashing 4000 and 6000 MAXen

[Bob Atkins <bob@digilink.net>]

After running OSPF successfully for the last 2+ years with MAX4000's
and MAX6000's we have had two recent events that are to say the least
surprising and indicate a *very* serious problem with Ascend's
(aka Lucent) OSPF code.

First off, the MAX 4000's are running v7.0.2 and the MAX6000's are
running v7.2.3. They have been as stable as can be expected from an
Ascend box, usually running for 60 days or so and then needing to
be reset due to 'clogged arteries' (aka memory leaks).

About three months ago out of the blue and without *any* changes having
been made to the network, namely our Cisco's - boom of a sudden *all*
of our MAXen crashed at the same time! And I mean at the *same* time
- boom everything went down, the 6000's and the 4000's. But it didn't
stop, each time within 3 minutes or so after rebooting - boom they'd
all go down again. The first time this happened we figured that we were
suffering some form of DOS attack.  However, once we shut down OSPF on
each MAX it remained up and stable.  We had to configure all MAXen to
proxy arp while we had OSPF shut down.

Ultimately, we shut down OSPF on all of our Cisco's temporarily (just
can't live without it on them) in order to totally flush OSPF info.
When we restarted OSPF on the backbone routers we found that we were
able to re-start OSPF on the MAXen and they remained stable.  Go
figure! I suspected that perhaps we had been running OSPF for so long
that the OSPF table version had exceeded some mystical value that the
MAXen couldn't handle. By shutting it down and restarting it on
everything I figured the value must have reset and we'd be good for
another couple of years.

Well so much for that theory as the same thing just happened to us
again just today - boom, all of the MAXen go down, they reboot and
within 3 minutes - boom they all go down again - at exactly the same
time and of course this keeps up indefinitely. As we shutdown OSPF on
each MAX and let it reboot it then stabilzes. If we turn OSPF back on
again, we get the same problem. I haven't shut down OSPF on our
backbone routers yet because that is a way too painfull experience. I
need to find a solution to this. Right now we are limping along using
proxy arp.

Anyone out there see any similar problems?

Any suggestions - I'm all ears.

Thanks,
Bob Atkins
DigiLink
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