[X-Istence]

One of the issues with newer switching/routing gear (if you want to call it issues...) is that they have to work at such incredible speeds that they are unable to actually keep up with verifying packet integrity before shooting it down into the next hop.

If you want 10 Gbit/sec line rate, one of the ways to do that is to simply forego any and all verification that packets are not corrupted and shove it out of an ethernet port as fast as possible.

I recently ran into this at work, we had some issues with corrupted packets, and we ended up tracing it down to a Twinax cable that was failing. But every single switch in the path to the server happily forwarded the corrupt packets.

Luckily Cisco has some internal counters that show issues like that, and after tracing it down multiple switches/routers we found the culprit and fixed the issue!

[jlgaddis]

> ... they have to work at such incredible speeds that they are unable to actually keep up with verifying packet integrity before shooting it down into the next hop.

Yep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-through_switching