I had a long (2 years) experience with GATED-based routers,
host-based
routers, etc. What did we learn from this experience (we just have a few
PC based routers now, but it's due to historical reasons and some
compatibility problems for old customer's unix-based routers), is the
next idea. Let's you have a few different router vendors (I mind software
vendors) in the global IP network, and both have 1 bug in their software.
In case if there is 99 Vendor-1 routers, and 1 Vendor-2 router, the bug
in Vendor-1 software cause the total network to have a problems, will be
fixed in a few days, and moreover, if the network environment (I mean
routing tables, AS pathes etc etc) appear in one point of the network, it
faile down surrounded routers and you should not be affected by this bug
and this network circumstances.
But if this circumstances cause the Vendor-2 router to fail down, and
they appear at some point of the network, all Vendor-2 routerss should
be affected by this bug because they are connected to the Vendor-1 based
network don't affected by this circumstances.
We saw this a lot of times for GATED (fortunately gated was used by Merit
and this forced them to fix the bug quickly; moreover some part of the
network have been isolated by Merit from us). We saw this for Wellfleets
sometimes. We never saw this for Cisco because any network influence
caused CISCO to crash was isolated not far from the origin.
I do not defence CISCO and do not blame Wellfleet or someone else; I only
tell about our experience. If your use rarely used routing program, you
are affected by the network splashes from the any point of
total Internet; if you use the same router as your peers and/or upstream
provider, you are isolated from such splashes (if this splash cause your
router to fail, it cause your peer/ISP's router to fail before).
This is the major reason why CISCO totally win the ISP market for now.
And this is why a lot of vendors prefere GATED to some third-party
software. This does not mean it's excellent. But it makes more difficult
for the network admins to choose new hardware if it's based on the
absolutely new software.
I'd like to prefere the flame about Wellfleet/Cisco/etc... But to prevent
CISCO's monopoly or MS monopoly, you should understand better why did
this monopoly appeared.
