[rancid] Trouble grabbing configs from a Foundry FesX

[Roman Hochuli]

Hello All

> they were added to clogin because some boxes were echo'g strangely and in
> some cases would drop chars at the end of a line.  slowing it down, made
> it behave more often than not.  but, what i mean there is the actual --
> part, not the -h.

We've got quite a bunch of those boxes. It is well known to us that for
example copy-pasting config snippets is not handled nicely under certain
circumstances on the FESX. The keyboard-buffer of the telnet-session
seems to be extremly limited.
Depending on config-mode and preceding command it may be completely
disabled, sometimes even ignoring or blocking input at all. Those
behaviours are bascially undocumented, but seem to be by-design.

The keyboard buffer issue is even worse with ssh. My rough guess for the
root of that problem is, that the management-cpu is simply overloaded
with calculating the encryption of the ssh-session. There were high-cpu
situation where we were unable to access the device over ssh at all
while telnet still worked (reasonably slow).

To be fair: the FESX6-series devices seem to behave a lot better than
the original FESX4-series devices. Newer firmware is also helping to
solve the keyboard-buffer issue at certain points.

So bottom-line: there are certainly reasons for slowing down command
input on that platform. :)

-- 
Best regards,
Roman Hochuli
Operations Manager

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