I have been following the the development of Vyatta over the course of about the past year and have been really excited to see it progress. As a Network Engineer for that last 7 years I have been brought up on IOS and over the past 2 years or so I have been learning JunOS.
Initially with previous Vyatta releases I was very excited to see the JunOS like XORP engine being used along with it's powerful policies, elegant configurations solutions, and overall ease of use. After reading the release notes for Glendale (VC4 Alpha 2) I was very excited about the new features and loaded it up in a VMWare as soon as I could. Lets just say I was more than disappointed once it loaded up. 1) The new vbash interface. I love the fact that there is a UNIX interface to my routers (even newer versions of IOS can do this and JunOS has it out of the box). Being able to do some lower level troubleshooting via a csh/bash/sh/etc CLI is invaluable. That being said there is no reason I need to combine my Unix CLI with my Router/Configuation CLI. I see this as a very very poor design decision and it will only attract to Unix admins turned Network admins. Vyatta will have a hard time being a serious competitor to Juniper, Cisco and the others. Going forward I would like to see vbash and a traditional both interface be supported, although as stated in my next point this may no longer be possible with the move to Quagga and away from xorpsh 2) Quagga?!? What happened to my elegant OSPF configuration? What happened to my wonderful and simplistic BGP configuration. Now i have a rehash of IOS (via Quagga) for configuring my routing protocols. JunOS/XORP routing policy was so elegant and now I am stuck with 1980's route-maps, community-lists and access-lists. Cisco still uses these for one reason: It's legacy code. Vyatta is a brand new router from the ground up. There is no need to go backwards. Also from a architectural stand point XORP has a great design base. I am very sad to see it go. I would like to know if there was any other reason from going away from a XORP base to Quagga besides quick turn around on features (and loose some great, features in the process) I also don't know if completely switching gears at this point in the game is wise. If you want a IOS like router you should of started there. There are some great things I have to say about Glendale as well: The RBAC is a great for a team supporting the routers. The other OSS projects you are able to incorperate into the systems (Remote VPN, wanpipe, etc) Although I know you will take this email seriously, I know you have already gone down a path I don't 100% approve of. So now I am going back to my proprietary Juniper and Cisco routers and wait for the day for another FOSS router to come out again. ~Brandon _______________________________________________ Vyatta-users mailing list Vyatta-users@mailman.vyatta.com http://mailman.vyatta.com/mailman/listinfo/vyatta-users
