It's very popular in some circles to bash gated; I'm not quite sure why.
I'm seldom able to get specific, substantive criticisms from people who
make comments like these, other than to say that the configuration language
is not obvious and not well-documented (I agree, for now).
Like any piece of software, gated does of course have some bugs in it, but
I haven't seen evidence that it has more or more egregious bugs than other
routing protocol implementations. And it gets a lot of things right that
some people don't -- for example, it sends withdraws only for routes it has
announced. I could go on, but I won't. The bugs are, of course, being
worked on as they are found, just as with any other software. IMO gated's
stability is pretty decent at this point. Likewise, it's missing some
features, which are also being worked on.
The proof of the pudding is of course in real-world use. As I assume most
people on this list know, more than one large, respected backbone operator
uses (or has used until recently) gated as their routing software, for
quite some time. I've seen no evidence to suggest that gated is
problematic for them; quite the contrary.
Regards,
--John
>You said - "gated"? Oh my gawd...
It's very popular in some circles to bash gated; I'm not quite sure why.
I'm seldom able to get specific, substantive criticisms from people who
make comments like these, other than to say that the configuration language
is not obvious and not well-documented (I agree, for now).
By my experience, gated have _WELL DOCUMENTED_ configuration files,
and well defined configuration ideas. The control for redistributions
is much easy via gated than via IOS. If IOS is the heap
of different commands withouth any order (let's try to configure
async interface - why do you have write -
peer default address ...
async ...
ip unnumbered ...
etc, etc - there is only THE GOD and THE SYSTEM PROGRAMMERS who can
remember this crasy configurations).
This is easy to understand _WHY_. THis is because gated is 1-protocol
router, not multiprotocol. It have not thousand of useless commands.
It was written by the small programmer's group.
Why do I write it? Not because I think freeware gated can compete with IOS.
But because gated is well designed project (and program) and it can be
impoved hardly by the good software company. And why do you think router XXX
have to be bad because it's based on _gated_ program? If somebody will implement
all nessesary IOS's features in the gated-based program - I'll prefere this
(if other things would be the same) because it's easy to configure and to control.