Cisco ASR9902 SNMP polling ... is interesting

[Drew Weaver via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

Hello,

We purchased an ASR9902 I think almost 2 years ago now intending to replace 4 routers with them.

We had a history of lets just say design decision quirks with the router that prevented us from deploying it until 
recently.

Then when we finally were able to implement it we've noticed something strange about how SNMP polling works in the 
router.

If we poll SNMP on any interface that isn't one of the built in management ethernet interfaces the response takes 
8x-16x longer to respond and exactly 62% of the polls time out.

If we poll SNMP on the built-in MGMT interfaces the responses are still slower than the ASR9001s that we used to use 
but they don't seem to time out.

I've had a TAC case with Cisco open over this for weeks now and they are now saying that the slow responses and the 62% 
poll timeouts are intentional and that they don't see any problem with the design.

I understand the security implications of having control plane stuff responding on all interfaces but the part I don't 
understand is why bind the SNMP daemon to the non MGMT* interfaces at all if they are making a moral or ethical 
decision to not allow SNMP to work on non MGMT interfaces. Shouldn't it just not work at all then? Who came up with 62% 
timeout as the right number?

The larger implication is that I still can't find another router from another vendor that does this.

Has anyone else run into this or did you guys all avoid the ASR 9902 like we should have?

Thanks,
-Drew

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