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Linked to Good reference for Cisco Resilient Ethernet Protocol

I am looking to demonstrate REP's effectiveness to non technical people, on an Industrial Network at a local university. I am a software developer(Studying to be anyway) and have little networking knowledge, my first thought was to use SNMP traps to record the renegotiation time of REP.

Has anyone tried to test REP before, and are there any better ways of doing it. (I haven't found MIB's for REP yet, so maybe another set back)

Thanks as always

Community
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Stephen Murby
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2 Answers2

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Why don't you set up a UDP sender and receiver and measure how many packets are lost when a link fails and REP comes into action? You could e.g. do this with iperf.

Or, even better, stream audio or video to show people how a link failure "sounds" or "looks" for an end user.

Oliver
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Here's the MIB - http://tools.cisco.com/Support/SNMP/do/BrowseMIB.do?local=en&step=2&mibName=CISCO-RESILIENT-ETHERNET-PROTOCOL-MIB

I agree about using some kind of traffic generation but it might also be useful if you can borrow an actual hardware test set (i.e. Ixia or Spirent) to both allow you to see fine-grained results of any tuning you might want to do as well as demonstrating the relative benefits of REP vs traditional STP (for example). Using a SW-based traffic generator is most likely more than good enough, my suggestion is just to add a few decimals of accuracy.

rnxrx
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  • **Thanks for voting up, I am unable** I have been speaking with the manager of the lab in which the kit is placed. It is an advanced engineering lab and they use image processing quite often to position robot arms to perform what ever job. I am not going to have any hardware available to aid me in testing, the money isn't available to borrow one, and the university bureaucracy means I will have gone grey and may be in a box by the time they could source one. – Stephen Murby Jun 20 '12 at 13:02
  • However monitoring the distance between the end of the robot arm, and a destination when it is moving at a known (Precise) speed should tell me how much extra time it has taken to get to is final vector (Renegotiation time), and streaming the video should show a non technical user how much impact the failure would have on something as data intensive as video streaming. Thanks folks, Really helpful – Stephen Murby Jun 20 '12 at 13:05