Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 27 Apr 2005 18:56:11 GMT
This isn’t exactly new news, but Cisco bought Sipura yesterday. Sipura makes a number of VoIP products, including the SPA-841 phone that I’ve been using for the past few weeks. They’re generally considered to have the best SIP implementation of any of the cheap vendors, and they make good, solid products for low prices. It’s a nice combination. Cisco has been licensing Sipura’s technology and using it in Linksys’s cheap VoIP hardware for around nine months now. Linksys has had to jump through a number of hoops to keep Sipura happy recently; apparently Sipura didn’t like customers buying the unlocked Linksys PAP2-NA instead of the more expensive Sipura SPA-2000. Now that Cisco owns both companies, I suspect that they’ll work out their differences.
Hopefully Cisco won’t gut Sipura to keep them from competing with Cisco’s more expensive products. The jury is still out on Cisco’s Linksys acquisition–they haven’t released many exciting new products since Cisco bought them, but they haven’t killed off any of their interesting product lines or tried to stop the flood of alternate Linux firmware distributions for the WRT54G family either.
One thing that’s interesting about this acquisition is that Sipura was formed by a bunch of ex-Cisco people. After Cisco bought Komodo in 2000, a bunch of the Komodo people left Cisco to go form Sipura. Now they’re back at Cisco again. This seems to be how Cisco does R&D these days–it spins employees off to work on their own products and then acquires them if they accomplish anything interesting. I’m not convinced that it’s a bad way to deal with R&D risk in a huge company–it shields Cisco from the cost of failure and promotes risk-taking by R&D engineers, but it doesn’t do anything to help unify Cisco’s massively fractured product lineup.
Posted in Phones, Asterisk, Computer Networking | Tags cisco, sipura, voip | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 18 Apr 2005 18:25:32 GMT
It looks like Cisco is finally starting to push their new, modular IOS code down from their uber-expensive CRS-1 router into their merely amazingly expensive routers. Network World is reporting that they’re almost ready to release a version of IOS XR for Cisco 12000-series routers. So now you’ll be able to run a semi-modern operating system that implements things like memory protection between processes on routers that cost under $500k. When they get under $100k, this might start to be interesting.
Cisco’s also going to release a line of “shared port adapters” that can be used in routers from the 7300, 7600, 12000, and CRS-1 product families. You need a SPA Interface Processor card for your router type, and then you plus SPAs into the SIP card. According to their picture, the SIP for the 7600 family can hold 4 SPAs, which means that the SPAs themselves must be fairly small–almost certainly smaller then the PAs that 7200/7400/7500 routers use. There are a pile of different SPAs on their list, from 8x cT1 to 10x GigE to 1x 10GigE, to OC 192.
Of course, in typical Cisco fashion, the “shared port adapters” aren’t really all that shared. There are 3 different SPA carrier cards for the 7600 series; one model is only good with the VPN SPA, and the other two overlap a bit–both are good with 2x or 4x OC-3 SPAs, but one supports 1x OC-12 while the other supports T1 and T3 SPAs. None of the three models support the GigE SPAs. Ther 12000-series has 2 different SIP models; one is good for T1/T3 use, while the other one is good for GigE and OC-192s. The CRS-1 SIP is even more fun–it supports POS OC-3s, POS OC-192, and GigE. No OC-12 or OC-48 support, apparently.
So, even though the cards are called “shared port adapters,” there are some real limits on which chassis will work with which cards. The DS3 SPA will apparently only work on the 7600 and 12000, and not on the CRS-1 or 7304. I suspect that a lot of this is mostly a driver support problem, but it shows how screwed up and fractured Cisco’s product lineup is.
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags bfr, cisco, crs1, ios, networking, router | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 09 Nov 2004 17:42:27 GMT
Slashdot has an article this morning on the OpenBSD people’s new BGP daemon, OpenBGPD. In essence, the OpenBSD people did the same thing that they’ve done repeatedly before, and taken a protocol that didn’t have an open, secure implementation and provided a clean, minimalistic, BSD-licensed tool.
Personally, I find OpenBGPD kind of fascinating, because I’ve worked with router jockeys for years, and I get dragged into “can we run a BGP daemon on this PC” discussions with surprising frequency.
OpenBGPD’s stated goals include this fun little snippet:
Provide a lean implementation, sufficient for a majority. Don’t try to support each and every obscure usage case, but cover the typical ones
And that’s where my problem lies. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked for a “lean implementation” of BGP. Every time I’ve been dragged into a BGP discussion, it’s been because network engineers have been trying to do something bizarre and creative with BGP, and the tools that they’re used to using aren’t sufficient. For instance, at Internap, we wanted to add per-prefix, per-peer prepending for a huge number of prefixes, and we wanted to change the path selection algorithm to include a bunch of extra information that we had on reachability and performance. In other cases, I’ve been asked for simulators and BGP loggers that could feed BGP prefix reachability information into a database. Inevitably, every time someone needed just a “lean implementation,” they’d already have a Cisco box handy and they’d use it instead of monkeying with BGP on a PC.
That’s not to say the PCs make lousy routers or anything like that–the price/performance is impossible to match with anything from Cisco–but that the totals costs involved in any BGP peering that I’ve seen make the cost of the router little more then noise in the equation. If you’re paying tens of thousands of dollars per month for multiple pipes to providers, then what does saving $20k on a router buy you, besides maintenance and reliability headaches and a hard time finding network engineers familiar with your setup? Most of the time, it’s cheaper to spend $20k on hardware and make it up on productivity and reduced downtimes.
So, while OpenBGPD is cool, I’m not sure how useful it really is outside of test labs and maybe small ISPs, if there are any of them left. On the other hand, I’d love a good OpenBGPD-ish OSPF implementation. I’ve played with Zebra, and the whole design of the thing just rubs me wrong (although Quagga might be better). I need to remember to actually give Xorp a try, too. OSPF is more useful inside of existing networks, and it makes a lot more sense on a LAN then BGP does.
When it gets down to it, I suppose my real point is this: it’s largely pointless to scale PC-based routers up to make them compete toe-to-toe against Cisco’s big WAN routers, because the network
costs and the maintenance costs of doing one-off routers works against us. It’s also really hard to get reliable, well-tested WAN interface cards for anything faster then a T1. Try finding a PCI OC-12 POS card with Linux drivers sometime.
On the other hand, other alternatives make a huge amount of sense:
- Scale them down. You can build a cheap Linux router for almost no money these days–look at the Linksys WRT54G.
- Scale them out. Imagine a medium sized company replacing all of their assorted branch office routers with PCs talking to DSL and providing QoS, routing, firewalling, VPNs, VoIP, etc. It’s expensive to do it once, but you can replicate the work onto a hundred devices for very little additional cost.
- Push them into niches. There are cases where the fantastic flexibility of PCs can make them much more useful then an equivalent Cisco. Linux, for example, has no problem running multiple routing tables and a fantastic number of firewall rules. You can do amazingly creative things with just the stock tools, if you can figure out how to use them.
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags bgp, cisco, linux, openbgpd, openbsd, router | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 25 Oct 2004 15:45:31 GMT
According to The Register, Cisco is currently adding encryption abilities into their phones and call manager software. The article’s kind of hard to follow–it claims that the 7960G currently has encryption support, which is news to me–but the general gist is that they’re planning on adding some sort of direct VPN support into most of their phones via software upgrades.
Knowing Cisco, the feature will be implemented in some odd manner (L2TP+1DES IPsec in the phone?) and will only work with the CallManager-specific SCCP image for the phones, not the SIP image.
On the other hand, if they actually added TLS/SSL support for SIP and SRTP, then that’d be a huge motivation for getting encryption in Asterisk.
Posted in Asterisk | Tags asterisk, cisco, cryptography, security, voip | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Mon, 13 Sep 2004 18:18:18 GMT
The Register claims that Cisco is going to release a new family of low-end routers today. There aren’t a whole lot of details on the new 1800/2800/3800 series yet, but the low end of Cisco’s line could use a lot of cleanup. There’s apparently some rumor about Linux-based line cards, but I’m not exactly sure where that’s coming from. I wouldn’t be surprised by a Linux-based IDS module for the new devices, I guess.
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags cisco, routers | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 22 Jul 2004 16:20:47 GMT
Okay, this is just strange. As mentioned before, I have a Cisco 7940 IP Phone in my kitchen, currently connected to a Linksys WET11 wireless Ethernet bridge. I’ve been having problems lately with weird connection failures, which I assumed was caused by low signal strength.
That is, until I looked at my logs. Apparently the phone has left my network and migrated onto one of my neighbors’ networks, because the phone is now logging in from Comcast’s IP space. This is strange on several fronts–first, the WET11 is supposed to be hard-coded to use my SSID. Second, I’ve never seen any of my neighbors’ networks from my PowerBook, and I’ve looked around a few times, just to see if I could track down the source of my interference.
I’ll try moving everything to a different channel tonight and see if that helps. Failing that, I guess I’ll have to pull out my drill and start pulling Cat 5 through the basement this weekend.
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags broken, cisco, linksys, voip, wifi | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 09 Jun 2004 18:55:21 GMT
Network World is reporting that Juniper is about to ship a pile of new low-ish end routers designed to compete with Cisco’s NM/WIC-based router lineup. They don’t have a ton of details, but there seem to be 3 models, the 2300 with two FE ports and two WAN ports, the 4300 with 6 WAN ports, and the 6300 with a faster processor and 6 WAN ports.
The quoted throughput rates are really low–the 2300 is only rated for 8 Mbps, which puts it in the same territory as an ancient Cisco 2500, which has less horsepower then most modern cell phones. Given that, I suspect that Network World is actually quoting VPN throughput. We’ll see next week.
Unless I missed something, this is Juniper’s first foray into this area of the market. It’ll be interesting to see how well they can compete, especially since Cisco is aggressively rolling VoIP and Ethernet switching abilities into the higher end of their competing products.
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags cisco, juniper, router | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 10 Sep 2003 01:17:52 GMT
It’s been an interesting week for work, and it’s only Tuesday. We’ve just started a big project at work to replace our existing grammar for Cisco IOS with a new, shiny one that’s more complete, and the sheer size of IOS keeps getting to me. There are probably somewhere around 15,000 IOS configuration commands, as we count them, and the grammar that covers all of them stretches the limits of most parser generators. We’ve been killing yacc this week, it’s been fun.
Posted in Work | Tags cisco, grammar | 5 comments
