Cisco and the tobacco industry

Sun Jul 31 01:26:53 UTC 2005

That's why we have Juniper Router in the market.
I guess somebody who wants to use *BSD kernel for baseline of Router 
Operating system moves to setup new company, and it became Juniper.
Juniper JuNOS uses FreeBSD as kernel.

Hyun

C. Jon Larsen wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, 30 Jul 2005, Jim McBurnett wrote:
>
>> If I remember correctly, This Exactly where Cisco has said they are
>> going...
>>
>> With the IOS XR Just as the beginning..
>>
>> Does anyone else remember this?
>
>
>
> On a different, older tangent ... coming from my possibly (probably) 
> flawed memories:
>
> A looong time ago ... back in 1996-97 or so ...
>
> A cisco rep promised a smallish VAR I onced worked for that a new code 
> base was being developed alongside 11.x and that it would likely 
> become the Next Generation IOS someday if it "worked out".
>
>
> It was supposed to be a complete ground up re-write in an OO language 
> and it would have the ability to link new modules or shared objects in 
> at run time, and it would unify the existing router (25xx / 4[57]xx / 
> 75xx) family with the Grand Junction acquisition - the CAT5K switch 
> family into one code tree and one IOS to run them all.
>
>
> Instead we saw a flurry of new hardware (26xx, 16xx, 72xx, 36xx) which 
> seemed to be a little more buggy than the older hardware
> especially when comparing the early 26xx and 36xx releases to the 
> 4[57]xx routers.
>
> I remember having some strange issues with early 26xx routers - like 
> the t1 wics wedging, the ip route cache getting corrupt, and 36xx 
> routers refusing to recognize NMs when you swapped them into new slots 
> or added new NMs. I always wondered exactly what those routers were 
> running - was it some of the "NG" code backported or just normal bugs 
> you expect when you are using all new chips, flash, and cpus (probably 
> the latter) ?
>
>
> Anyway, I asked the cisco rep why they didn't just port *bsd or linux 
> and use that and he said there were some "smart people that had 
> already considered that and ruled it out as a bad idea."
>
>
> Wonder if cisco regrets this (I dont have any idea, I'm just wondering 
> aloud). Would cisco have been smarter to already be running, say 
> OpenBSD as its kernel and then its IOS services as daemons ? Might 
> have opened up licensing problems for them that would have been a huge 
> headache too.
>
>
> Is cisco the only major router/switch vendor running a home grown 
> (i.e. not commercial rtos or *bsd / linux based derivative) for its 
> core OS ?
>
>
> Do folks that control purchasing decisions care whether their selected 
> vendors use a general purpose or proprietary OS when they are 
> evaluating products ?
>
> I know that personally I dont like to buy gear that uses Microsoft 
> win2(x) or winCE as its host (whether its a pbx, firewall, router - 
> remember MS Steelhead?, etc). But thats just me ...  Do people stop to 
> think about what is really inside their router or network appliance 
> when they buy it or do they only care what the *printed* manual says 
> can be done with their shiny new box ?
>
> (Dislaimer - I like cisco gear a *lot* and I guess I am one that 
> always considered IOS pretty secure though I do always put interface 
> and vty acls for limiting access to the control plane when permitted 
> by the end customer).
>
> -jon
>
>
>