Renumbering: Threat or Menace

Remember when wide area networks consisted of private lines between a few offices routed by a good old fashion classful distance vector protocol? Ever take one of those networks and grow it by several orders of magnitude? Guess what happens? Things begin to break, and network analysts run scared. Herein, we tell the story of how Silicon Graphics, Inc. replaced our old creaking network design for 26 sites with a new bells and whistles design for 200+ sites. The astute reader can savor the irony of some of the (sometimes painful) lessons we learned along the way.