Cheap Juniper Gear for Lab

Wed Apr 11 23:47:31 UTC 2012

sthaug at nethelp.no writes:

>> Anyway, not the best devices for an edge router that is for sure.
>> Which is too bad...  for very small DC edge applications, the J6350
>> was a pretty cool router in earlier versions of JunOS that didn't
>> decide to re-engineer your network and transit for you.
>
> We have 3 J2320s in the lab, all running 9.3R3.8. That's the last
> *real* JunOS (no session/flow tracking) for these boxes.
>
> They'll stay in the lab, and they'll never be upgraded to anything
> newer. Which is too bad, I had great hopes for the J series.

Got a pair of J2350s in the previous job to run as part of a command
and control network.  Had the same "I just want this stuff to route!"
experience that others have mentioned and griped about.

We tried running on 9.3 but - surprise - 9.3 won't do 32 bit ASNs.
That came in 10.1 or something.  As a member of the ARIN Advisory
Council, I felt compelled to eat the same dog food that I was selling,
and we found ourselves at an impasse.

We ended up putting the C&C network in VRFs on a couple of MX80s that
were already there.  With a few contemptuous comments on the side we
sent the 2350s back to the VAR.

I think my successors ended up undoing the VRFs and putting Cisco
2951s in their place.

I've heard it hypothesized that this change was related to the costs
of maintaining two different packet forwarding paths (remember that
the J series used, in 9.3 and before, an emulation of the ASIC in the
hardware based routers) and that, having decided to cancel one, they
decided to cancel the "less featureful" one.  This is a reasonable
decision to make even if we don't like it as techies.

None of the difficulties we had, however, would have gotten in the way
of the OP's apparent goal of getting comfortable typing things like
"show chassis environment", "request system software add", "show
config | display set", and "show version and haiku".

Unlike Owen I'm not going to say "useless due to security { ... }",
I'm going to say "useful with caveats, and you might want to think
twice about what you're trying to do before moving it out of the lab".

-r