What is hair pinning, and why would I want to use it?
A. Hair pinning is bringing traffic in on a tributary and instead of putting it on the high speed OC-N line you direct it out another low speed tributary port. You might want to do this if you had interfaces to two IXCs on different nodes. If one of your IXCs went down you could hair pin the other to pick the traffic, assuming the spare capacity existed on the tributary.Hairpin cross-connections allow local drop of signals, ring extensions supported by a ring host node, and allow passing traffic between two ring interfaces on a single host node. In this case, no high speed channel is involved and the cross-connections are entirely within the interfaces.
A. Hair pinning is bringing traffic in on a tributary and instead of putting it on the high speed OC-N line you direct it out another low speed tributary port. You might want to do this if you have interfaces to two interexchange carriers (IXCs) on different nodes. If one of your IXCs goes down, you can hair pin the other to pick the traffic, assuming the spare capacity exists on the tributary. Hairpin cross-connections allow local drop of signals, ring extensions supported by a ring host node, and allow passing traffic between two ring interfaces on a single host node. In this case, no high speed channel is involved and the cross-connections are entirely within the interfaces.
