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Anyone out there using SCTP? Especially on Solaris and Linux? What are your experiences - is it ready for production?

Jonas
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2 Answers2

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SCTP is fine so long as you're only using it on a single network. It's already used quite extensively on many major telco networks.

However many firewalls, middleboxes, etc, don't know what to do with it. There are three levels of support:

  1. full - the unit knows about SCTP, and can permit or deny applications based on SCTP port numbers
  2. partial - the unit allows you to permit or deny specific IP protocols (SCTP is protocol 132) but you can't specifiy individual ports
  3. none - the unit will ignore the packets because it doesn't recognise them

I believe that the second level is probably the most common at the moment.

Alnitak
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Yes, we have been using SCTP in production telco systems for several years.

We are using it both for SIGTRAN (SS7 over IP) communication with other network elements and as the underlying protocol for the internal communication between our nodes.

There have been a number of issues with the Solaris implementation, and a number of patches from Sun/Oracle, but I would definitely say that it is ready for production now.

So far we have only used Solaris but we are looking into delivering our systems on Linux. We build our systems on Java and have so far used our own JNI wrapping around Solaris' SCTP support. We are now migrating to Java 7 and intend to use the built-in SCTP support that is available on both Solaris and Linux.

I guess we will discover whether SCTP on Linux is stable enough :-)

Johan Kaving
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