GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother))

Mon Oct 21 12:11:57 UTC 1996

>   If we are going to argue, then let's talk about functionalities of various
>   implementations and then take it to respective developers of your favorite
>   implementation so that all our tools are better.
We are using _both_, and have some comparation:

(1) IOS have more features in comparation with gated - no doubt, because
IOS was developed in the longer time. Through gated.conf is well-defined
language, IOS's config is a great heap of very strange commands and nodoby
(almost) can  config IOS coprrectly withouth great practice.

(2) There is some tasks we can't solve in IOS at all, or can solve in very
hacker's vays. That's because IOS and gated have quite different schemes
of redistridutions (in gated, I can control PROTO->PROTO redistribution
on the per-neighbour basis; in IOS I can control redistribution into
the BGP protocol totally);

(3) There is very interesting idea in gated - it recalculates 'localpref' into
the 'preference'; it allows to provide some back-up schemas we can't do in IOS at all.

Of cource gated have not (yet?) some IOS's functionality - bgp reflection,
bgp community (IMPORTANT!), have quite other (in comparation with IOS) 'localpref'
control. But when we are generating our gated's and IOS's configs from the
data base - this task is much easy for _gated_ than for _IOS_.

And I hope if Ascend have made commercial revision of gated for their
routers - they does have a chance to compete with the IOS.

--- 
Aleksei Roudnev, Network Operations Center, Relcom, Moscow
(+7 095) 194-19-95 (Network Operations Center Hot Line),(+7 095) 239-10-10, N 13729 (pager)
(+7 095) 196-72-12 (Support), (+7 095) 194-33-28 (Fax)