[scurvy]

A couple of elephants in the room:

Why on earth were you running a hosting business with Cisco 2950s? Those are wiring closet desktop switches with tiny buffers. That alone probably caused a lot of pain. You didn't know about it, but they did.

Second, the Juniper J4350 is a software router based on BSD. There's no special hardware in there like ASICs. It's just a PC.

JunOS (historically) is based on BSD. They're moving to Linux now.

I love OpenBSD for small projects too, but let's admit that there was some bad logic in this decision making process. This could be called "how the mx10 saved my ass because I went with undocumented, unproven open source project that has been on github for 3 days" if the technologies were reversed.

[mioelnir]

> JunOS (historically) is based on BSD. They're moving to Linux now.

Do you have details on this? Given how active they are in the FreeBSD community, I would have thought to have heard about that already.

[nemith]

Depending on how you look at it some platforms are already running Linux.

QFX5100 runs a Linux KVM hypervisor with the traditional FreeBSD based Junos running as a guest. Same with the new x86 based SRX (SRX1500). There are more moving to this model.

The x86 based SRX is the most interesting with the forwarding daemons running on the hypervisor OS and the Junos based VM is just for management and protocols. It's not that hard to see that management and protocols can be easily ported.

There are more details that are locked behind an NDA.

[tres]

Ha, my first gig with a hosting company, 2950 was at the top of every. single. rack. We grew that company from a rack to about 40 racks using 2950s. Each one of those racks had hundreds of VPS customers. We didn't have issues with 2950s not doing what they needed to do, in fact, they were perfect for the job -- performance, price and design were just right & the success of the business kind of underscores that.

Later on, I was working a network overhaul at a private college dedicated to video game creation (DigiPen). Each student was provided a desktop with their own roaming profile. These profiles got huge because there were things like 3D Studio Max projects being transferred to whatever computer the student happened to be at during that period. So we're talking about hundreds of students signing on at about the same time & massive amounts of data being transferred in a very short time. The old network topology was melting down on a regular basis causing the entire campus to come to a halt.

We fixed that by putting in a pair of -- you guessed it -- OpenBSD/PF routers. Now this wasn't some "oh crap" kind of bandaid fix; we had planned this all out & implemented over the summer months when there were no students. It was all planned out (the only problem was that the original plan called for FreeBSD & PF, which crashed -- once we had OpenBSD running, it was 'set it & forget it.')

Maybe I'm just too dumb to know the difference, but those 2950s and OpenBSD routers helped me sleep a lot better at night... they were perfect for what they were intended to do.

And as more than a decade of experience since has proven, the right tool for the job is often the one that gets scoffed at as a "toy" or good "for small projects."

[scurvy]

You monitored those ports for drops, buffer errors, and discards? You alerted when they occurred? Most don't watch the right counters or log messages. Even then, I guess you can get away with it if your customers aren't savvy enough to complain. Detecting microbursts in a VM would be impossible. Ignorance is indeed bliss.

One of my first bosses thought his Dell switches were awesome until I showed him all of the drops.

Also, roaming profiles were a great idea in principle and a horrible idea in practice. There's a good reason those things went away circa Windows 2000. ;)

[teacup50]

I've heard nothing about JunOS moving to Linux. That would be a truly bizarre move on their part, both in terms of technical quality of Linux vs FreeBSD, and licensing headaches with the GPL.

Do you have a source?

[merlincorey]

I found an article[0] from the end of 2014 that mentions they are using linux for some Open Compute project based switches (OCX models), as well as Yocto Linux as KVM hypervisor for JunOS on some models.

[0] http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/nethub/juniper-emb...

[profeta]

well, he did mention the lack of $150k for the proper cisco hardware.

[scurvy]

In economic terms, this would be known as "barrier to entry" if you don't have the money to enter the market. In business terms, it's known as "the cost of doing business." Not having the money to push packets is bad when you're in the packet pushing business. That's like trying to run a high frequency trading shop from Alaska and blaming your ISP instead of the speed of light.

That said, you can buy a ton of good gear cheap on the secondhand market. This is extremely popular in the lower end of the hosting market. It's cheap. It works. It's a known quantity. You can get secondary support from companies like NHR. You don't have to buy gear new.

Used gear was probably a much better decision than new gear here.