CEF is not the only mechanism to implement distributed forwarding
(within or without Cisco for that matter), and to say that distributed
forwarding is faulty because of software complexities of one
manufacturer, whose code base is built upon on a monolithic core (to use
operating system would lower what it means to actually be a operating
system) is to generalize all failures to a distributed architecture
where the fault does not _always_ lie.
CEF and dCEF periodically break on Cisco. They break in the most interesting
ways - the debugging indicates that the packets are going one way when they
in reality are going the other way. Without CEF or dCEF Cisco's are useless
for the amount of traffic that I am interested in.
Juniper is very interesting. The only problem is a gazillion strange things
that it tries doing. Juniper's BGP has very intereting bugs in
confederations which I have discovered on the day #1 of putting one of them
into production. That bug is still not fixed. Since confederations are very
widely used, and no one else found this bug, and yet we have hit it nearly
immediately, there is some sort of logical problem here. If something as
simple as AS_PATH prepending in confederations does not work, I have some
big reservations about things that are much more complex than that.
Nortel has some exellent hardware that they have inherited from Bay
Networks. Unfortunately, they still have not written the software to take
any advantage of it, nor they developed it to the level where it can
actually complete with the new offerings from the other vendors.
Thanks,
Alex
Alex, there are some promising local isps that have large bgp networks
with confederations and the confed behavior is fine. I am not sure what
you mean by as path prepending in confederations, but if you are talking
about the routers not taking into account the confederation member AS's in
the overall as path length when doing route selection, than that is what
was expected by most people using confeds. [The question of wether AS_PATH
prepending of confed member AS's should matter or indeed if as_path length
should matter at all is a different question]
As for your link state protocol issue, well, that is what we have today
that works (of course depends on how you define work, but its worth
several billion USD of revenue a year), so I'll take it till something
better comes along.
/vijay
> into production. That bug is still not fixed. Since confederations are very
> widely used, and no one else found this bug, and yet we have hit it nearly
> immediately, there is some sort of logical problem here. If something as
> simple as AS_PATH prepending in confederations does not work, I have some
> big reservations about things that are much more complex than that.
Alex, there are some promising local isps that have large bgp networks
with confederations and the confed behavior is fine. I am not sure what
you mean by as path prepending in confederations, but if you are talking
about the routers not taking into account the confederation member AS's in
the overall as path length when doing route selection, than that is what
was expected by most people using confeds.
No, I am talking about Junipers PR#13233. Your friendly Juniper Systems
Engineer should be very glad to explain to you what exactly that means.
Alex
Thanks for sending the PR, and while I don't see a need for it, it may be
useful in some cases. Thats not a bug per se though, its an
implementation detail 
/vijay