AFAIK there is no such thing as a PIPE-150, and if you have proxy
arp switched on then you might see this behavour. You did read
the manual ? 
I use the GRF-400 and it works well, Although I agree that Ascends current
support management is completely broken. As for Ethernet, in my experience
if you push anything near to 100M you should really spend the extra cash
on FDDI, it works far better. The POS card for the GRF works excellently,
you can use it as a frame relay switch, however Ascend manage to do
stupid things like break your ability to restrict AS annoucements via
AS path. sigh.
For ethernet server farms I use Xylans Omniswitch which I've yet ever
to have a problem with, other than they charge for software updates.
I also use the Xylan as an FDDI switch and again it works incredibly well.
Ascend's remote access division majorly screwed up with the TNT which
caused a knock on effect to its other remote access products I do believe
they have learned the lesson on that. But they still lack a good
method of reporting problems and releasing tested code.
I've also used BSD PC's [and orginally NetBSD/sparc] at Demon we had 2 lines
to Sprint using Morningstar Snaplinks to drive them and GateD 3.4 and 3.5 on
a 32M Sparc IPX :-). sl-dc-4 used to be an AGS, our PC performed
better than that pile of junk! If you are on a budget then buy a couple
of pentiums and a copy of BSDI, BSDI works great as a router / server
or a workstation.
PC's are fine up to E1 speed, after that you loose, there are no
good E3/DS-3 cards for a PC. BSDI have good support for a lot
of strange devices including the RISCOM N2 serial card. [Where is the E1
card Ascend?]
I've never used Cisco as a backbone router, used them for remote access
and CPE and they do work well for that. I simply disagree that the Internet
is built on Cisco and whilst they maintain that I won't purchase
their equipment.
Bay is a total nightmare, we have 2 Bay Networks connected customers,
one never made their machine talk to our FR switch, the other had Bay
at his site for 4 days whilst they tried to figure out a config.
Regards,
Neil.
