/24s run amuck

Wed Jan 14 22:06:02 UTC 2004

If you have had any experiences, good or bad, with Imagestream, please
contact me off-list (or here).  I would appreciate any or all of your
collective input.  

Thank you,
Shawn

--
Shawn Solomon
Senior Network Engineer / Systems Design
IHETS / ITN
317.263.8875   ssolomon at ind.net   fx317.263.8831

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
jlewis at lewis.org
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 4:20 PM
To: Michael.Dillon at radianz.com
Cc: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: /24s run amuck

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:

> I stand corrected. The following page comparing Cisco and Imagestream
> is quite interesting.
> 
> http://www.imagestream.com/Cisco_Comparison.html
> 
> How many of you would buy an Imagestream box to evaluate for
> your next network buildout? 

I've been managing a couple of these for a customer for a couple of
years.  
They work.  The main problem I'd have with trying to use them on our 
network is a lack of certain features I'm either used to or totally 
dependent on in our ciscos.  

i.e.
MPLSVPN (lack of it) would be a show stopper for us.
The gated-public they come with lacks features...AFAIK there is no
support 
for communities, prepending, etc.
Their current software image does include zebra now, but last I looked
it 
was not officially supported.

For a relatively simple end-user BGP customer, it works fine.  And the
nice thing is it's PC-type hardware so if you need more RAM, just throw
in
another dimm.  No worries about the global routing table growing and
having to buy a bigger router because your year or two old one no longer
supports enough memory to hold full routes.  I suspect the CPUs are
upgradable as well...but I've never actually touched the hardware...I've
always worked on it remotely.

OS-wise, it's a minimal Linux distribution with a menu interface (or you
can drop to a shell) and there is a little space on the flash to add 
additional software if there something you want that they don't supply.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis *jlewis at lewis.org*|  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |  
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