Dell - Internal Use - Confidential
I personally never ran the Ascend gear (outside of a setting up a customer's Ascend Superpipe 95 dual ISDN router one time), but I heard that the TNT gear doubled as space heaters. I remember one facility we were in that had a catastrophic cooling failure and the temperatures went to insane levels. Our PM3's happily kept running and never had an issue where I heard every TNT box in the facility kept rebooting and crashing.
-Vinny
All I remember from the TNT days is the meltdown when Code Red happened.
Why exactly an access platform should melt down when a worm occurs still
bothers me.
-Blake
That's the day we decided we needed better edge routers :-).. I watch a modem pool infected with code red melt a cisco 3640. Had to throw a Linux box in it's place while I waited for Cisco equipment.
Sam Moats
Wait, you mean to say that the normal mode for TNT's was it *not* to reboot
and crash all the time? 
Ascend tech support's stock answer to any issue was either
1) Upgrade the code
2) Oh, you already tried that? downgrade the code!
And the company that managed to put out a release to 'fix a spelling error'
that managed to completely break all IP routing?
(Yes, I loved the PM2/PM3's)
Ken
We had gear in the MFS Colo in Whippany, NJ. We had a couple routers (2501's and a 4700M), a couple PM3's, and some other crap. Near us were TNT's and Total Controls from ANS (remember them??).
Yeah, it got warm in there, especially when the single 10 ton AC unit failed (about every other day).
But, it was way more fun back then.
Have we gotten any better at control plane meltdown when somebody starts
poking lots of multicast addresses per second?
no, a point entirely lost on the vxlan clergy.
Nick