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

[Steve Amato]

sthaug at nethelp.no wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> juniper-nsp mailing list juniper-nsp at puck.nether.net
> https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/juniper-nsp
>
>
>   

I can't agree more. It's very frustrating and makes it difficult to have 
a "standard" interface setup.

-- 
Stephen A. Amato
Sr. Network Planning Engineer
Frontier Communications
585-214-1770
samato at frontiernet.net