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From: woods@ncar.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.sys.cisco
Subject: death of a router
Message-ID: <33572@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 22 Mar 91 04:30:11 GMT
Sender: daemon@boulder.Colorado.EDU
Lines: 44


   We just subnetted a part of our network with a Cisco AGS+ router. The router
has two 6-port Ethernet cards in it but only one is being used. The other
hosts on our network are using class B netmasks and we are relying on proxy
arp to allow the physically separated subnets to communicate with each other.
This means that each interface has multiple IP addresses and multiple ip routes
(the router of course has to have a 255.255.255.0 netmask to implement this
properly). The question I have is, about 3 times over the last three weeks,
the router just hangs. It won't answer pings, it won't forward packets,
and even the console port will not respond. Unfortunately we have our
console port wired to a port selector device so if any error messages are
printed on the console we don't get to see them. Has anyone seen similar
behavior or have any idea what might be going on? Are there in fact any 
helpful error messages that might be printed when the router "crashes"
like this? (I could temporarily hook up a terminal to the console port if
I had to; it would be kind of a pain so I don't want to do it unless there
is reason to believe some helpful information could be gained by doing so)
The router always comes back to normal operation if it is powered off and on.

--Greg

						  NSFnet backbone
						       |
						   ----------
						   | NSS    |
						   ----------
						       |
						       |--other AS's routers
						       |
						   ----------
					           | AGS    |---  USAN net
						   |router  |
                                                   ----------
                          Ethernet backbone            |
===============================================================================
       |                           |
   ----------                  -------------
   | bridge |                  |   AGS+    |<----this one keeps crashing
   ----------                  | router    |
    |  |   |                   -------------
                                  /  |  \
    serial lines                Ethernet subnets
    to offsite
    Ethernets