[c-nsp] Software Download Enhancements

[Michael Loftis]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:49 PM, Gert Doering <gert at greenie.muc.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 08:34:35PM +0100, Pavel Skovajsa wrote:
>> I have just received notification below.
>>
>> ////////////////////////////////
>> Get Ready for Software Download Enhancements on Cisco Website
>
> Enhancements, heh.
>
> Oh well.  I think we'll go and buy more Vendor $J gear in the future
> - "a single OS image that runs on all their routers" (at least that's
> what I've been told).
>

Ah, sort of.  With Juniper there's basically there's one image for
each major product category -- more or less.  So the J series has an
image, the M/T another.  The MX has it's image, and last I knew
there's two for the EX series (one for like the EX2200s and another
for the EX8K boxen) It's available in multiple versions for each
usually.  And there's a clear EOL/EOS list published.  Its very simple
to find the RIGHT image for your platform, especially compared to
Cisco.  They do have the legacy ScreenOS stuff as well.  Within all
the non ScreenOS stuff though there's the common CLI and config
language/syntax.  The major operations are all identical across the
board.  There's even more consistency in interface naming/numbering
(IMO anyway, I've heard others take a dislike to it!)

Juniper certainly has much less of the insanity of feature levels and
release trains and their undefinable relationship between each other
that Cisco tends to do.  I personally can rarely figure out from a
IOS* version number whether it's newer than any other given version
number...and then you're still left with a completely different IOS
download for each little product variant.  And then within those
you've got sometimes a half dozen different release trains.  Just
figuring out which one is *current* can be a nightmare.