[j-nsp] junos 10.0 / interface-range implementation

[Frank Sweetser]

On 11/06/2009 10:10 AM, Curtis Call wrote:
>>
>> So basically, I can now group my interfaces and have those grouped
>> interfaces share certain characteristics. That's nice for some
>> applications, but it does not help at all with the problem of
>> provisioning one-off stuff on ports that are not really grouped (meaning
>> that each port might end up with a totally different config at some point
>> in time) but that still should be configured identically initially. So
>> watch out, it's not the "interface range" many folks were expecting.
>>
>
> If a commit script was available that automatically moved all
> interface-range configuration under the indicated interfaces (and removed
> the interface-range), would that be more useful?  So, rather than treating
> interface-ranges as permanent configuration structures, they would be
> treated as temporary repositories of configuration statements that should
> be copied to the indicated interfaces at the following commit.  Would that
> be of interest?

That would be a good start, but interface sets (not just ranges) are often 
useful in other operational commands, such as monitoring interface states and 
various counters.  For example, on switches that support it I'll often 
repeatedly run a command to show interface states on two or three 
non-contiguous ports to monitor their state as various things are tried with 
machines at the other end.  On an EX, I'd want to be able to run a command 
something like this:

show interfaces ge-0/0/1,ge-0/1/2-4 terse

and have it produce results for ge-0/0/1, ge-0/1/2, ge-0/1/3, and ge-0/1/4. 
Some basic wildcard matching would be very nice, too - something like ge-0/0/* 
would be more convenient than having to manually specify the full range.

So the ideal (for me, at least) would be that, for any operational or 
configuration command where you specify an interface, you would be able to 
specify an arbitrary set of interfaces and interface ranges.

-- 
Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu  |  For every problem, there is a solution that
WPI Senior Network Engineer   |  is simple, elegant, and wrong. - HL Mencken
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