From: Howard C. Berkowitz (hcb@gettcomm.com)
Date: Sun Jul 18 2004 - 16:00:00 GMT-3
At 11:51 AM -0500 7/18/04, robbie wrote:
>This is a slightly off-topic question, but I think that it does have
>some small degree of relevance. How many of you are familiar with
>other vendor equipment that performs the same tasks as some of the
>equipment on the Cisco lab? Do you feel that the familiarity with
>this other vendor equipment has better prepared you for the 'theory'
>side of understanding the technologies, and not just the practical?
>
>I'm asking this because I'm quite proficient with other network
>vendor equipment (specifically, Netscreen/Extreme/Ascend/Adtran),
>and I think that I've come to a better understanding (overall) of
>the subjects discussed in the labs and the R&S written, simply
>because of having to learn the concepts and apply them to different
>platforms. Does anyone else have any similar experiences to share?
I often found Wellfleet/Bay/Nortel (getting worse from left to right)
documentation of router functions better written than Cisco's. When I
first started learning access lists, for example, I found the W/B/N
terminology of "templates" and "filters" much more intuitive than
"access lists" and "access groups". Just as I will go to relevant
RFCs to clarify something I don't quite follow in Cisco
documentation, I'll often look at another vendor's documentation of
the same idea.
Admittedly, when I worked for Nortel, I gained special insight by
seeing and designing router architecture and code. It's interesting
that while there's a great deal of secrecy on the more marketing side
of Cisco, there often is considerable discussion of exactly the way
something was done in IOS in IETF, NANOG, Cisco-NSP, and similar
mailing lists.
I do think it can be very useful to put a Zebra (or a couple of other
alternatives, mostly for BGP) router into one's lab, because you can
use it to generate deliberate bad routing packets. At Nortel, we
often used LINUX/Zebra boxes as test generators, since they were more
flexible than purpose-built routers.
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