Router Choice

Tue Nov 18 07:06:19 UTC 2008

On 15/11/2008, at 12:30 AM, Paul Wall wrote:

> For those of you who want to have a chuckle, grep the word "exit" on
> any of these fine 7750/7450 router configurations. Seeing a router
> configuration that contains 10,000+ instances of the word "exit" makes
> me recall the fine book FINAL EXIT. Seems like a poor mans version of
> nesting with { }'s in JUNOS.
>
> ..stuff..

Try out the GUI thing.

I know people will go "GUIs are for idiots!" and all that.

Seriously, try it before you knock it, it's really very very good, and  
doesn't try and hide things from you like traditional GUIs do. You can  
do XML stuff in to it for automated service provisioning etc. etc.  
etc. with templates, and so on. I've done quite a lot of this for  
lawful intercept, automated debugging of VoIP stuff, service  
provisioning, etc.

Switch out the hardware, and the GUI/mgmt system will give it the  
config it should have. This is all configurable, so it doesn't annoy  
you if you don't want it to.

Make changes in the CLI, and the GUI knows about it within a second or  
so - it gets an SNMP trap or something and updates accordingly. None  
of this periodic scan rubbish that you get with Dorado RMC etc.

The GUI product name is 5620SAM.

Also, before you try 7x50, do a training course so you understand how  
things work - thinking is quite different to Cisco/Juniper.

For example, in the 7450, VLANs:
- VLANs are specific only to a physical port, they are not per-box  
like Cisco etc.
- To build a L2 VLAN, you create a VLAN on each port that you want to  
hook up (numbers can be whatever you want, do not have to be the same  
on every port) and then create a L2 service[1], and add the VLANs on  
each port in to the L2 service.
- L2VPNs

Because of this, VLAN tag re-write is not an extra feature - it is a  
core component of how switching works across the platform.

They really seem to have thrown away a whole bunch of conventional  
thinking, and the result is, in my opinion, really quite good.

--
Nathan Ward

[1] I believe that it's the same L2 service that you use when creating  
a VPLS.

--
Nathan Ward