pjones@cisco.com (Patrick Jones) (06/21/91)
The following is a response to the many calls Cisco received concerning the gateway software release version 8.2(4) and AppleTalk routing. The calls were generated by a concerned customer who experienced problems on their network. The issues were quickly resolved with the details given below. Please, if any site experiences any problems with our products regarding AppleTalk or any other protocol, give us a call at the Technical Assistance Center: 1-800-553-2447. If you prefer e-mail, then a message to "customer-service@cisco.com" may be used. Patrick Jones Technical Support Manager Cisco Customer Engineering Problems were recently reported with AppleTalk in version 8.2(4) by University of Indiana. I thought I would explain the problem they found. The fix for this problem has been submitted for 8.2(5). We do not consider this to be a critical failure and we continue to believe that 8.2(4) is the best version for all AppleTalk sites. The routing table data structure, replaced in 8.2(4), fails to check for a reversed cable range (ie 98-2) when processing tuples in an RTMP data packet. This is not a legal tuple and is never normally generated. However, some routers may not check for this error during configuration and the router could then send such a poison packet. Certain combinations of illegal cable ranges can violate the assumuption that routing keys are always positive and corrupt the routing data structure. This results in a crash and immediate restarting of the router. During the 3+ months of 8.2(4) beta testing, which was conducted at eight major sites (with a combined total of more than 2200 nets), this problem was not encountered. We do not believe that there is a high probability that sites will encounter this problem. -dle David Edwards AppleTalk Engineer Cisco Engineering