FoundryNet: network engineering reference and the Foundry Networks archive

This site occupies the domain that Foundry Networks used from 1996 until its acquisition by Brocade in December 2008. For a decade, foundrynet.com was where network engineers went for configuration guides, datasheets, security advisories and release notes. Thousands of university IT pages, ISP wikis, forum threads and encyclopedia footnotes still link to those documents. When the company was absorbed, the site went dark and every one of those links died. FoundryNet exists so that they land somewhere useful again.

The site has two halves that serve one reader. The reference half explains the technologies in current, vendor-neutral terms: what server load balancing actually does with a connection, how 802.1Q tags move through a trunk, why spanning tree still matters, how VRRP elects a master, what an sFlow sample is worth statistically. Each guide shows the general shape of the configuration in the IronWare command line as one worked example, because that is what the original documents at these addresses described, and because a great deal of that hardware is still running in labs, schools and small ISPs.

The archive half is an independent, unofficial record of Foundry Networks: the company history, the Brocade deal and where each product line ended up, one profile per product family, the security advisories page that replaced the old bugTraq listing, a command-line cheat sheet, and the answer to the question that arrives most often from people who bought a switch at auction: there is no default IP address, so here is how to reach the console and recover the password.

Nothing here is copied from the original documentation and no Foundry, Brocade or successor PDFs are hosted. Where a fact could not be verified against a primary source it is hedged or left out. Every page carries a sources list and a named editor, and corrections are invited through the contact page. FoundryNet is not affiliated with or endorsed by Foundry Networks, Brocade, Broadcom, Extreme Networks or Ruckus/CommScope; product names appear for identification only.

Since the relaunch the reference half has also taken on a current problem that sits squarely inside network operations: a growing share of requests now comes from automated clients and a growing share of configuration text is written by machines. The guides on spotting AI crawlers in edge logs, shaping crawler load at the balancer and checking generated configurations before they ship treat that the way the rest of the site treats spanning tree or VRRP: mechanism, configuration shape, failure modes, verification.