To get away from the issue of whether a specific new brand does or does not violate Cisco intellectual property considerations, let me comment as one who has been down this general route as a router product manufacturer and architect.
Essentially, there are two remaining serious user interface paradigms for routers: command line and structured. Due to Cisco's market share, potential competitors are often asked by customers to be "Cisco compatible" in their command languages, to avoid the cost of retraining. This often leads to absurdities. First, many customers don't make the important distinction between things you do in exec mode and in configuration mode. It's one thing to mimic interface configuration statements, but when a customer, for example, wants to do some sort of "show CEF" and your router has its own proprietary high-speed forwarding, things get silly very quickly. Second, while a line-oriented language is familiar, it isn't as desirable from a skill scalability standpoint. It's much easier to autogenerate and error check a strictly structured language. Essentially, the structured languages are the UNIX derivatives (GateD, Juniper), and, in a different way, advanced Bay/Nortel RS that is strictly modeled on the MIB. Of the commercial portable routing implementations, one (GateD/NextHop) has a structured language, while the other (Zebra/IPinfusion) has a line-oriented language. There are tools that can do partial conversion to and from the more abstract Routing Policy Specification Language, but repeated efforts in the IETF to develop a standard configuration language have failed. I'm honestly not sure to what extent the latter is feasible, because there always will be product-specific features to configure. Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=49961&t=49961 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
