[j-nsp] Today's frustration: ERX lack of "description" field

[sthaug at nethelp.no]

My personal preferences are definitely the M/T series, but I also
work with ERX. My current ERX frustration is the incredibly stupid/
insane/non-intuitive lack of a plain interface description field.

Yes, I can have "ip description". For *some* types of interfaces. I
can have "ethernet description" - but seemingly only for the main
(physical) Ethernet interfaces. I can have "atm description", but
again, only for main ATM interfaces. I can *not*, however, have a
plain "description". This is converted to "ip description", with a
warning that "description" is deprecated.

So why oh why cannot ERX have plain "description" like M/T and lots
of other router/switch vendors? The current situation leads to non-
intuitive and confusing behavior like the following:

- An ATM "pure PPPoE" interface (no IP) like the following:

 interface atm 4/1.118034
  atm pvc 118034 118 34 aal5snap 0 0 0
  encapsulation pppoe
  pppoe auto-configure
  pppoe profile any pppoe

needs "atm atm1483 description" to have a meaningful description
field, while an Ethernet "pure PPPoE" interface (again no IP) like
the following:

 interface gigabitEthernet 5/0.8420023
  svlan id 842 23
  pppoe
  pppoe auto-configure
  pppoe profile any pppoe

needs an "ip description" (despite having no IP configured).

- Configuring a main GigE interface with "description" earlier today,
it was converted to "ip description". So far so good. But when I then
try to add "encapsulation vlan", I get "Add VLAN major interface failed
(interface already bound to ethernet interface)" - and I have to do a
"no interface" on the main interface to remove the "binding" that I
never asked for. This is even documented in a Juniper KB article,

http://kb.juniper.net/CUSTOMERSERVICE/index?page=kbdetail&record_id=02520308dcd5d010908cb3e2e004e8b

Needless to say, I find all of this cumbersome, non-intuitive, POLA-
breaking, irritating, and lots of other not so nice words that could be
used.

I want plain "description", which is not tied to any specific interface
technology/protocol, and which doesn't lead to "magic" bindings when it
is configured. Is this really so hard?

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug at nethelp.no