GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother))

Mon Oct 21 14:12:57 UTC 1996

In message <199610181535.LAA16775 at mercury.int.sprintlink.net>, Dima Volodin wri
tes:
> alex at relcom.eu.net writes:
> > 
> > >
> > >     >Subject: Re: GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother))
> > >     >From: dvv at sprint.net (Dima Volodin)
> > >
> > >     >You said - "gated"? Oh my gawd...
> > >
> > >   I agree. Oh my gawd, someone is using one of the most efficient and
> > >   reliable pieces of routing code around. What a really great idea. There
> > >   are other smart router vendors who use various route and policy storage
> > >   data structures from gated. Oh my gawd. Some smart router vendors are
> > >   implementing dynamic non-intrusive policy config on their routers this
> > >   year. Gated had that 4 1/2 years ago. Oh my gawd. Etc etc...
> > >
> > >                   RobS
> 
> Gated would dump core like crazy and lose routes and adjacencies 5
> years ago and it does the same now. Well, on the second thought, I
> don't think there's any real reason to bitch about it - all the other
> free reference stuff (sendmail, inn, etc, etc. Even 4.4) is plagued
> with the same problems. And everybody is kind of accustomed to the
> status quo. As of data structures - I remember there was a course on data
> structures on my first university year. And you know what? I haven't
> seen anything new since then - gated or no gated.

Gated was the most reliable routing platform we had when the NSS were
retired.  It wasn't perfect in that we still had an unresolved
assertion error occasionally but it either ran and pointed everything
in the right direction or asserted, dumped, and restarted.  The
alternates can't seem to get routes to consistently point in the right
direction and so I'd have to say are much worse.  I'll take a 5 minute
assertion and recovery once a week over a persistent route loop or
black hole.  I don't know of any commercial router which gets the
routes and next hop right as consistently as gated does, that includes
both Cisco and Bay.

The fact that gated could accept complex routing configurations and
flawlessly reconfigure usually in under a minute is something
commercial routers still have not matched.

wrt - conf syntax.  My preference is for a structured context free
grammar that I can edit or inspect with a powerful text editor if I
need to rather than a line oriented command interface primarily
intended to be typed in one line at a time.  That's just a personal
preference.

Curtis