Bay Networks

From: Ken Seefried <ken_at_seefried.com>
Date: Tue Jun 26 09:32:58 2001

>BTW, does anyone know anything about Bay networking systems?

Err...too much. I've got some clients running them, and I've done several
non-trivial networks using them.

>I once bought a big, white case at the fleamarket, which had
>been in service at a power station. One label said "LAN BRIDGE
>REPEATER" or something to that effect, and when I finally wedged
>it open, it seemed to be a VME system. The "main" board had two
>68020s, one at 16 and one at 20 or 24 MHz. The system
>also had a floppy drive, which was accessed at startup, and spome
>status lights. Other boards had several serial ports, AUI and some
>other ports which I couldn't recognise.

They are VME (sorta), and long ago obsoleted. You had a really old one;
they matched Motorola pretty close as far as processors, eventually being
one of the few big adopters of the 68060.

Backplane ran down the middle. You plugged a processor card in one side,
and a ports card in the other, for each slot. Ran from, as I recall, a one
slot fixed unit to a 13 slot monster (BN/BLN). The OS they ran was loosely
multiprocessing, with an image running on each processor card. This allowed
you to reboot a single processor board without bringing the whole box down
(well...there were caveats, especially if you were running OSPF). Nice
boxes, in many ways better than the competing Cisco product.

As an aside, unless you were really good at remembering SNMP OID strings,
you configured the things with a tool called Site Manager. This is *still*
one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used; they've done nothing to
fix it in a decade. And every different version of the router code required
a different version of Site Manager; little or no forward or backward
compatability.

>Bay have since been bought by another companym which in turn has
>been bought by yet another, which made finding information about
>it quite impossible. Why do people feel such a desire to dismantle
>the web sites of conquered companies?

It's more complicated than that. That router was actualy produced by
Wellfleet, who later merged with Synoptics to form Bay Networks. Bay was
later purchased by Nortel Networks, who is now in the process of trying not
to go out of business. A search for "Wellfleet router" should give you
sufficient info.

Ken Seefried, CISSP
Received on Tue Jun 26 2001 - 09:32:58 BST