I've spent days on the phone with [substitute your favorite router
vendor here] customer support and engineers tracking down bugs in
their routing software and trying to get bug fixes and workarounds
from them, and I've spent comparable days running gdb on gated and
staring at gated code and my personal opinion is that working with the
gated code was a far more valuable experience for me. Gated is very
stable for me now, and if I don't like the way something works, I
change it or add a new feature if I want.
My experience in consulting has taught me that off the shelf products
from vendors with professional customer support (i.e. black boxes
approved by Fortune 500 companies) are better for some clients, but I
have clients that appreciate software like gated and are willing to
pay for my time to work with it.
You can always join the gated consortium. The gated web pages at
Merit indicate that there is some level of support available for
those willing to pay for it. Can anyone with experience comment
on this?
Is source code and a development environment available (and afordable)
for the gated implementation in the Netstar product? If it is and
the product is reasonable in other ways, I'd be on their doorstep in
a minute. Are source licences available from any of the other major
router vendors?
