On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 04:21:08PM +0100, Bruce M Simpson wrote: > We're talking about a code delta which is relatively large compared to > asking people to adapt a little to get their IP routing thing for > potentially less money.
A code delta which is very easy to produce with sed and friends. Though you are kind of missing my point... > At the moment, "it ain't broke", so let's just leave it for now, IMO. I work in the Internet service provider business and have done so for the last couple of years. I spend roughly half my day staring at an IOS prompt and I know a great deal of people just like me. What I don't know, is someone using XORP. A lot of people have heard about it and many have tried it out but rejected it for some reason. Now, I don't only stare at this IOS prompt for a living, I'm also quite interested in it on a personal level and spend a considerable amount of my free time tinkering with network stuff. Although my budget is nowhere near that of my employer I have managed to gather a quite nice pile of equipment ranging from GSRs to M5s. Over time I have learn that GSRs consume a shitload of electricity and puts out an almost equal amount of heat not to mention the space they occupy - and finding fast interface for a Juniper is a bi***. This is where I imagine XORP and other routing suites would step in. A lot of people pursue the open-source-routing-suite-path for slightly different reasons than I but I believe the reasons for not choosing XORP are the same. More on that in a bit... What I would like is of course to find an open and extensible router platform to suit my needs. When I was unable to do so, I instead looked at what would be the closest match and try improve on that. Et voila... XORP! The ambition of course being to help XORP into world domination. Not being a programmer has proven to be somewhat of an obstacle - I've spent countless hours going through XORP code and eventually just giving up on whatever I had set out to do. Coding isn't my ballgame, so what can I do to help? Well, I know what I like about routers and I know what I don't like, perhaps sharing this could help the project gain some acceptance amongst other networkers like me. Hasso Tepper wrote an excellent piece http://hasso.linux.ee/doku.php/english:network:xorpsucks I'm just going to give a +1 on the whole thing. The lack of support for recursing routes and with it the absolutely silly side-effect of having to specify next-hop for your BGP neighbors make the BGP module close to worthless for iBGP relations. No templating or even per-peer policies is hilarious, how do you expect anyone to be able to use this in a real network? I have routers with hundreds of peers, keeping one policy for all those up to date would be close to impossible. At least so difficult I don't even want to think about trying. As Hasso mentions the CLI displays things in an awful manner. No leaf-nodes without value or the mandatory {} for all branch-nodes makes it painful just to look at the configuration. The only thing that I can come up with from the top of my head that I would list as a nice feature is the marking of new lines (">") in the config. .. well, then you have the multicast protocols as well, but XORP doesn't have much competition amongst the open source alternatives in that area. Competing against commercial vendors we are down to the ">"-marking part. I got carried away a bit, returning to the [46] thingy... If we go back to when this was implemented, why was ospf4 and ospf6 chosen in the first place? Why wasn't the already familiar ospf[v3] nomenclature chosen? Why have a Junos-similar shell but deviate for no apparent reason? I've hardly seen a discussion on a list _before_ the name for something was chosen, rather the implementor chooses something and then it sticks. For this reason I would like to know the plan for future "stuff" and maybe even have a saying in it. I would be sad to see another deviation from what is the de facto syntax out there. It makes networking kind of guys dislike the software and that is probably the worst thing for an open source routing suite. It has been argued before that the user base of XORP is familiar with X and changing X would create a disturbance and thus it is left as is. Does XORP have an active user base (more than the handful of people on this list) ? For how many people would changing something become a nuisance? Why not try to adhere to what people are used to and try to get the basic stuff like CLI and BGP to work before implementing fancy stuff like firewall rules? Not that the latter is a bad thing, I'd just like to see a different prioritization here. Kind regards, Kristian. PS. I'm still impressed by XORPs architecture (creds for that) though that doesn't change the fact that I as a network engineer hate to use it. DS. -- Kristian Larsson KLL-RIPE Network Engineer / Internet Core Tele2 / SWIPnet [AS1257] +46 704 910401 [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Xorp-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/xorp-hackers
