Thread: BGP Router

Originally Posted by samb

Or you can go down the Quagga route and get access to someone like us to support it if you have a problem.

You develop quagga source code!?

Originally Posted by goscombtech

You develop quagga source code!?

We're not core developers, but a few of us have contributed patches over the years. I like to think we'd have as good a chance at finding a bug in Quagga that affected a customer as Cisco would with a similar IOS issue (or Juniper, or whoever).

fair enough

Personally i'd rather pay Juniper a support fee as there's a large team who are extremely knowledgable and helpful when you call JTAC. Also all the features you'd expect in a router are there without merging patches, 3rd party software, etc. (MPLS, L2VPN, VPLS, MD5 on BGP sessions, Multicast, etc)

Add to that the power and nicety of JUNOS policies, commit/rollback on configs, nicer style of config editor,etc and i'd take them any day.

Don't get me wrong, we started on Quaggas, but if the current J series were around then I would have bought those. We still have some J series boxes in use and they are fantastic, but most of ours are now upgraded to M series which are fantastic boxes. Quagga had its issues back then. Now I can sleep easy at night

We also use Cisco for LNS's and a few other bits and bobs... I can't stand the config format any more... all this "address-family" splitting of MBGP, etc is a pain in the ass and makes the config extremely difficult to read. Oh, and NETCONF actually works properly on JUNOS :P

If anyone wants any Juniper advice please feel free to shout

Originally Posted by goscombtech

fair enough

Personally i'd rather pay Juniper a support fee as there's a large team who are extremely knowledgable and helpful when you call JTAC. Also all the features you'd expect in a router are there without merging patches, 3rd party software, etc. (MPLS, L2VPN, VPLS, MD5 on BGP sessions, Multicast, etc)

Add to that the power and nicety of JUNOS policies, commit/rollback on configs, nicer style of config editor,etc and i'd take them any day.

Don't get me wrong, we started on Quaggas, but if the current J series were around then I would have bought those. We still have some J series boxes in use and they are fantastic, but most of ours are now upgraded to M series which are fantastic boxes. Quagga had its issues back then. Now I can sleep easy at night

We also use Cisco for LNS's and a few other bits and bobs... I can't stand the config format any more... all this "address-family" splitting of MBGP, etc is a pain in the ass and makes the config extremely difficult to read. Oh, and NETCONF actually works properly on JUNOS :P

If anyone wants any Juniper advice please feel free to shout

The only advice I want about Juniper is where I can pick up a practice box or two to learn the platform for a half decent price.
At the moment I'm a bit of a Cisco boy, I'm comfortable with their switches and routers as it's what I've always used but I'd love to learn JUNOS

Originally Posted by freethought

The only advice I want about Juniper is where I can pick up a practice box or two to learn the platform for a half decent price.
At the moment I'm a bit of a Cisco boy, I'm comfortable with their switches and routers as it's what I've always used but I'd love to learn JUNOS

J2320 are < £1k new

Else run an olive, or even a whole load of olives on QEMU

JUNOS Cookbook, Juniper Networks Field Guide, JUNOS Enterprise Routing <-- are all you need to know. The latter has a lot of J-Series stuff in it. Like Dan said, get a 2320, although don't expect that it can do everything and expect to find it a bit difficult to upgrade (as in the CF card /Junos etc) compared to most of the rest of the Juniper range. Also the J series do MPLS so they are great practice tools for anyone interested in that, although you'll need M series to do serious Layer 2 over WAN stuff.

or read the manuals... the JUNOS documentation is first rate. In fact, a lot of stuff in there you won't find in any books; multicast being one of the topics i could find nowhere else but in the official documentation.

edit: I hit that thumbs thing by mistake... its not meant to be there!

I'd echo others comments on Juniper J series. The 4350 and 6350 are smashing boxes. You can pack em full of 2GB of ram from crucial and off you go. we've using route reflector code on em, so we've upto 3 full tables per router in the network (12 routers) and they work very well.

The equiv box from Cisco 7301 is around 8k UKP approx and cisco will likely laugh at you if you haven't bought the memory from them if you have a problem after the fact.

Just to chime in if your using a Cisco 7 series router your going to need a minimum of 512mb of RAM as there are over 250k routes in a typical full transit routing table. Best bet as a medium cost solution is to build a linux box with BGPd as mentioned earlier.

Stuart

Originally Posted by bluewave

Best bet as a medium cost solution is to build a linux box with BGPd as mentioned earlier.

quagga is medium cost!?

Originally Posted by goscombtech

quagga is medium cost!?

Those 1GB sticks of RAM cost £30 these days you know

For the same price as a decent Quagga/OpenBGPd box, you can have a Juniper J-Series, that's before you factor in the time spent optimising your Linux/BSD for best PPS throughput.

Originally Posted by Karl

For the same price as a decent Quagga/OpenBGPd box, you can have a Juniper J-Series, that's before you factor in the time spent optimising your Linux/BSD for best PPS throughput.

not to mention the hardware replacement warranties and 24/7 JTAC access which is far from a "please help me" mailing list!

Obviously, the J-Series cost a bit more than the equivilant Quagga/OpenBGPD stuff, but it's nice to know that if it goes wrong we phone Juniper and say "fix please". We've only ever had to use JTAC twice (that's accross a range of SSG and J-Series devices) and both times they've been knowledgeable and helpful. Both times were for obscure bugs. Our current Juniper core routers then Cisco Layer 3 switches at the edge is working absolutely brilliantly. I'd recommend them, but I know a lot of people are of the opinion "Quagga works, so why invest in something with commercial support", the only thing I can say against Juniper (or their resellers) are the lead times. We've ended up paying more on quite a few occassions as we didn't want to wait 6 weeks.