[j-nsp] What is your experience with the EX2200

[Kevin Day]

I've got a few EX2200s and EX2300s and have been pretty happy with both. The complaint below is most likely due to the power going out *twice* before a successful boot is completed. What seems to happen is if power is lost, and while it's rebooting the switch loses power again, it assumes there's a problem with the primary partition and flips over to a backup image with no configuration. It's hard to tell that this happened though, and a pain to recover from. The reboot time is pretty excessive, which can also make people think it's broken so they try power cycling which increases this problem. I do have an EX3300 that seems to corrupt the filesystem on every power loss though, so it could be either.


The problems with the EX2200 I've seen:

* The CPU and RAM are barely enough for some complex configurations. It's possible to have processes killed when running out of ram. SNMP requests can get lost easily while it's busy. Disk I/O feels worse than floppy speed, plan for very long downtimes to do an upgrade.
* Disk I/O is so slow, things like "request system snapshot" can timeout without completing.
* Older builds had problems where if the temperature sensor went below 0C (cold start in an unheated environment) it read the temperature as 255C and would immediately shut down because it thought it was on fire. (Really, see KB23253)
* The switch actually has a fair bit of smarts in dealing with very cold temperatures, but later builds (that fix the above point) occasionally will log "Triggering freezing circuitry..." panic then and get stuck in a reboot loop. (PR1183631)

The problems with the EX2300 I've seen:

* The out-of-the-box version of Junos on them has a clock bug where it says its NTP synced, but the system clock gets advanced to 2038 and things go crazy. It's sometimes difficult to keep the switch running long enough to upgrade it.
* It's also painfully slow to reboot, but not quite as bad as the EX2200.
* Some old half-duplex devices don't negotiate with the EX2300, but work with the EX2200. It's improved with later builds, but not perfect.


Overall neither switch has had bad enough issues that I'd shy away from them. The 2300 is definitely an upgrade that I'm happy with.


> On Dec 8, 2017, at 1:06 PM, Matt Freitag <mlfreita at mtu.edu <mailto:mlfreita at mtu.edu>> wrote:
>  - Sometimes when they lose power abruptly it corrupts the file system on
>  the primary partition. Best way I know of to solve this is a complete
>  reinstall of the OS on the routing engine.