Cisco and Juniper

Mark Knutson

Kaminsky wrote: »

I heard that the guys that wrote IOS left Cisco and formed Juniper and wrote JUNOS. Anyone know if this is true ?

Could be one of those fables like the guy who wrote Novell NDS was poached by Microsoft to write Active Directory. Now that I do believe as I was a Novell Admin at the time and they AD seemed a blatent rip off of NDS.

Its not that hard to write sofware like IOS or AD, so they could hire the programmers, or get some programmers to write a new one. The IOS user interface is so cumbersome and unintuitive, I wouldn't be in a big hurry to make a close copy of it.

Yeah, I remember when novell was The Thing. How the mighty have fallen when they refuse to recognize that their margins are going to fall due to competition.

Forsaken_GA

Mark Knutson wrote: »

Its not that hard to write sofware like IOS or AD, so they could hire the programmers, or get some programmers to write a new one. The IOS user interface is so cumbersome and unintuitive, I wouldn't be in a big hurry to make a close copy of it.

Well, as I mentioned, the guys at Force10 disagree with you (and yes, they do have former Cisco engineers working for them). Just because you may not like the IOS interface doesn't change the fact that there are thousands upon thousands of people who are trained to use it. That's no small consideration.

tiersten

Mark Knutson wrote: »

Its not that hard to write sofware like IOS or AD, so they could hire the programmers, or get some programmers to write a new one.

I don't see how writing a replacement for IOS could be classed as "not that hard". You need to implement a vast variety of protocols and interfaces as well as a routing system which is robust and scaleable enough to handle significant amounts of traffic. Just implementing a basic TCP/IP stack isn't a trivial task.

kalebksp

tiersten wrote: »

I don't see how writing a replacement for IOS could be classed as "not that hard". You need to implement a vast variety of protocols and interfaces as well as a routing system which is robust and scaleable enough to handle significant amounts of traffic. Just implementing a basic TCP/IP stack isn't a trivial task.

Nah, you just modify IMPS do all the work for you, easy!

Kaminsky

Aldur wrote: »

... They took the knowledge they had and they built JunOS around the idea making a better, more stable and user friendly OS then IOS ...

This is exactly the reason I liked Juniper when I first came across it. The user interface just seemed more modern.

Mark Knutson

tiersten wrote: »

I don't see how writing a replacement for IOS could be classed as "not that hard". You need to implement a vast variety of protocols and interfaces as well as a routing system which is robust and scaleable enough to handle significant amounts of traffic. Just implementing a basic TCP/IP stack isn't a trivial task.

The zebra open source program supports BGP-4, BGP-4+, OSPFv2, OSPFv3, RIPv1, RIPv2, and RIPng--isn't open source written by teams of volunteers? Writing and IOS is not a trivial task, but its not that hard if you get a team of qualified programmers together.

Cisco has market share for a variety of reasons, but I don't think the difficulty of writing the control software is one of them. Now building a superior electronic product at a given price point is a non-trivial task...

Mark Knutson

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Well, as I mentioned, the guys at Force10 disagree with you (and yes, they do have former Cisco engineers working for them). Just because you may not like the IOS interface doesn't change the fact that there are thousands upon thousands of people who are trained to use it. That's no small consideration.

And yet juniper took a different route...

tiersten

Mark Knutson wrote: »

The zebra open source program supports BGP-4, BGP-4+, OSPFv2, OSPFv3, RIPv1, RIPv2, and RIPng--isn't open source written by teams of volunteers? Writing and IOS is not a trivial task, but its not that hard if you get a team of qualified programmers together.

Just because it is an open source project doesn't mean it is easy to replicate. How many hours and how many people have worked on Zebra or any of the other major open source projects? It isn't just a case of throwing a team of programmers at a project and hoping for the best. You're underestimating how much value is actually in software and how much work it would require to replace.

Mark Knutson wrote: »

Cisco has market share for a variety of reasons, but I don't think the difficulty of writing the control software is one of them. Now building a superior electronic product at a given price point is a non-trivial task...

As evident by the dynamips emulation package, the earlier Cisco routers were mostly based on off the shelf components. The value in it was and still is the software. Newer routers have acquired additional Cisco specific ASICs to accelerate packet handling however. That is the reason why dynamips doesn't support any newer routers.

Forsaken_GA

Mark Knutson wrote: »

And yet juniper took a different route...

Yes and no. JunOS is very Unixy, and that type of interface has been around longer than IOS.

cerberos

Well, It's quite embarrassing YouTube - Juniper's Dirty Secret, however, both Cisco and Juniper do a great job...

Mark Knutson

tiersten wrote: »

Just because it is an open source project doesn't mean it is easy to replicate. How many hours and how many people have worked on Zebra or any of the other major open source projects? It isn't just a case of throwing a team of programmers at a project and hoping for the best. You're underestimating how much value is actually in software and how much work it would require to replace.

Well, I am not going to prolong this, but I have been programming for 30 years, and my sense is that a team of programmers who have open source code to use as an example is not going to have much trouble putting together a router/switch operating system. It might be a lot of work depending on how one defines a lot, but my sense is that it would be a minor part of the challenge to getting a product out the door.

Just to be clear, my sense is that much of the functionality is built into the hardware and that IOS (moreso in newer gear) is often simply setting registers or bits in configuration blocks and building tables in memory. Since I know nothing about designing digital hardware, I am willing to believe that is a complex and expensive task.

As I said, my own assessement is that the barriers to entering the market are in the marketing and hardware engineering side of things. Doubtless the 'mindshare' of people who know IOS represent another entry barrier.

Think we will just need to agree to disagree on this one.

Mark Knutson

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Yes and no. JunOS is very Unixy, and that type of interface has been around longer than IOS.

Having used unix quite a bit over the years, I'm not going to claim it is any more intuitive than IOS.

Forsaken_GA

Mark Knutson wrote: »

Having used unix quite a bit over the years, I'm not going to claim it is any more intuitive than IOS.

Hehe, I hear ya. All I'm saying is that no router vendor has really chosen to reinvent the wheel when it comes to a CLI. I prefer that it be based on something else I know, because that lowers the learning curve. I'm not really sure how intuitive you can make a router or a switch, since so many of them are an amalgamation of protocols and features and pretty much have to be for interoperability reasons

Mark Knutson

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Hehe, I hear ya. All I'm saying is that no router vendor has really chosen to reinvent the wheel when it comes to a CLI. I prefer that it be based on something else I know, because that lowers the learning curve. I'm not really sure how intuitive you can make a router or a switch, since so many of them are an amalgamation of protocols and features and pretty much have to be for interoperability reasons

One thing cisco is doing is developing some graphical front ends like SDM. From what little I used it, SDM has an easier to use interface that launches a bunch of character-based commands to IOS. And I guess SDM is no longer The Thing, but they have something else coming up.

As is the case with many such point and click admin tools, the expert admin has to be able to navigate the command line for those times when the gui tool can't do the job, or something needs to be sorted out.

Another good thing about IOS not being re-done is that we can practice on old gear that is inexpensive...

Another thing I was thinking, was that one of the reasons I chose to pursue the ccna and learn this cisco stuff was that it is fun to learn hardware and software that is entirely alien to the pc/windows stuff that I have worked with for the past 20 years.

Forsaken_GA

Mark Knutson wrote: »

One thing cisco is doing is developing some graphical front ends like SDM. From what little I used it, SDM has an easier to use interface that launches a bunch of character-based commands to IOS. And I guess SDM is no longer The Thing, but they have something else coming up.

I absolutely hate GUI's, to be honest. I cut my teeth on CP/M, ran DOS for many many years, and I'm a big fan of most flavors of Unix (I say most because I loathe Solaris). So I grew using a CLI, and it's where I feel most comfortable. In SDM's case.... I use it for a very very small amount of things in actual practice. Usually just for the monitoring aspects. I've just found that whenever I let SDM do something, I spend just as much reviewing the config and fixing the changes it made that I didn't want, that it would have been easier on me to just configure it from the damn CLI in the first place.

I'm also not a fan of Jweb on Juniper's end.

Another thing I was thinking, was that one of the reasons I chose to pursue the ccna and learn this cisco stuff was that it is fun to learn hardware and software that is entirely alien to the pc/windows stuff that I have worked with for the past 20 years.

I got into networking because it was a natural progression for me. I've spent virtually my entire life making computers talk to each other, going back to the good old BBS days when I was 14. Never really intended to turn my hobby into my career, but since it's what I'm good at, figured I might as well get paid for it!

human151

does juniper have anything like VTP & CDP?

thenjduke

Very well said. I grew up with Commodore Vic 20 and beyond and boy those were the days BBS. I miss the 800.00 to 1500.00 Phone bills my mom would get and I be in trouble. I miss getting the commodore books and typing the programs they had out there. I miss the Wild BBS days.

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

I absolutely hate GUI's, to be honest. I cut my teeth on CP/M, ran DOS for many many years, and I'm a big fan of most flavors of Unix (I say most because I loathe Solaris). So I grew using a CLI, and it's where I feel most comfortable. In SDM's case.... I use it for a very very small amount of things in actual practice. Usually just for the monitoring aspects. I've just found that whenever I let SDM do something, I spend just as much reviewing the config and fixing the changes it made that I didn't want, that it would have been easier on me to just configure it from the damn CLI in the first place.

I'm also not a fan of Jweb on Juniper's end.



I got into networking because it was a natural progression for me. I've spent virtually my entire life making computers talk to each other, going back to the good old BBS days when I was 14. Never really intended to turn my hobby into my career, but since it's what I'm good at, figured I might as well get paid for it!

Pash

human151 wrote: »

does juniper have anything like VTP & CDP?

Yup, Juniper has GVRP - Juniper Networks :: Technical Documentation :: Example: Configure Automatic VLAN Administration Using GVRP

And CDP, nope, would be nice to have something like JDP I think Aldur will probably correct me but a simple IS-IS adjacency entry might show similar information, I could be wrong though.

Aldur

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

I'm also not a fan of Jweb on Juniper's end.

heh, yea, I'm not a big fan of Jweb either. It's got some nice monitoring tools but I prefer using the CLI any day.

Pash wrote: »

And CDP, nope, would be nice to have something like JDP I think Aldur will probably correct me but a simple IS-IS adjacency entry might show similar information, I could be wrong though.

Although it would be nice, there's no CDP like protocol in JUNOS, it least on the routers that is. ISIS will definitely give you some good info but I believe that it only lets you know that you are connected to an ISIS speaker but no real device specific info.

The EX switches do support LLDP which does function similar to CDP but this isn't found on the routers.