[j-nsp] JUNOS 10.4S6 for EX8200 - PR/676826

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 08:59:26PM +0800, Mark Tinka wrote:
> 10.4R4.5 today on our EX3200's/4200's.

We were forced (kicking and screaming) into 11.1S2 on our EX8200s for 
some feature support that just wasn't available any other way, but all 
things considered the code has actually been pretty darn good (as far as 
EX code goes). Put it this way, I was expecting a LOT worse. Yes you can 
still royally screw up the fib if you insert cards while it's 
converging, or make it take an hour to update the fib by looking at it 
funny, but things have actually been relatively stable and light on the 
other "major" issues (crashing, blackholing, etc). Chalk one up to the 
new development process I guess, though personally I'm still pretty darn 
annoyed at the whole hour to update the fib thing. :)

> >         SRX, you might as well run whatever came on it,
> > because it won't work anyway.  The ALGs don't work, at
> > times proxy arp doesn't work, your logs will be full of
> > interesting (and scary) error messages, bugs that were
> > supposed to have been fixed aren't, licensed features
> > (like dynamic-vpn) don't work at ALL, etc.
> 
> None here, but the constant pain about them on the list is 
> glaring.

I have an SRX210 in my basement doing my home routing, and it is the 
only free device I've ever been given that I would seriously consider 
returning and asking for my money back. Broken doesn't even begin to 
describe it, my condolences to anyone who actually needs to run these 
things in production.

> > 	M/T series probably have the most flexibility as 
> they
> > have been around long enough not to push people towards
> > 10.4/11.[12] -- people can just select the appropriate
> > SR.
> 
> Agree - we have far fewer issues with these as they're older 
> and most of the new junk going into Junos today isn't to do 
> with them save for a couple of features (which are sometimes 
> hardware dependent) and general bug fixes.
> 
> We've hit some silly bugs on the M-/T-series lately, but 
> nothing near as bad as the MX.

We've been running 10.4 on MX ever since R4, with a healthy mix of 
I-chip and Trio boxes (not combined though), and the code has actually 
been pretty solid. Yes there are some outstanding issues somewhere 
between "annoying" and "obnoxious but you can work around it" that still 
aren't fixed until R7, but in the grand scheme of things it all mostly 
works. Then again, after the debacle that was 10.2 I'm excited when the 
things don't randomly shoot flaming packets out of their ass, so maybe 
it's just a case of lowered expectations. :)

> Can't blame you. If you're new to Juniper, just coming from 
> Cisco, feelings might be familiar. If you started with 
> Juniper back in the days of Junos 5, 6, 7 and 8.4, as they 
> say, "Those were the days".

"About as good as Cisco" is where I'd put things today on the code 
reliability scale. Not to say that I'm "happy" with that state of 
affairs, but as Homer would say, "urge to kill... fading...". :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)