sthaug@nethelp.no writes:
Anyway, not the best devices for an edge router that is for sure. Which is too bad... for very small DC edge applications, the J6350 was a pretty cool router in earlier versions of JunOS that didn't decide to re-engineer your network and transit for you.
We have 3 J2320s in the lab, all running 9.3R3.8. That's the last *real* JunOS (no session/flow tracking) for these boxes.
They'll stay in the lab, and they'll never be upgraded to anything newer. Which is too bad, I had great hopes for the J series.
Got a pair of J2350s in the previous job to run as part of a command and control network. Had the same "I just want this stuff to route!" experience that others have mentioned and griped about. We tried running on 9.3 but - surprise - 9.3 won't do 32 bit ASNs. That came in 10.1 or something. As a member of the ARIN Advisory Council, I felt compelled to eat the same dog food that I was selling, and we found ourselves at an impasse. We ended up putting the C&C network in VRFs on a couple of MX80s that were already there. With a few contemptuous comments on the side we sent the 2350s back to the VAR. I think my successors ended up undoing the VRFs and putting Cisco 2951s in their place. I've heard it hypothesized that this change was related to the costs of maintaining two different packet forwarding paths (remember that the J series used, in 9.3 and before, an emulation of the ASIC in the hardware based routers) and that, having decided to cancel one, they decided to cancel the "less featureful" one. This is a reasonable decision to make even if we don't like it as techies. None of the difficulties we had, however, would have gotten in the way of the OP's apparent goal of getting comfortable typing things like "show chassis environment", "request system software add", "show config | display set", and "show version and haiku". Unlike Owen I'm not going to say "useless due to security { ... }", I'm going to say "useful with caveats, and you might want to think twice about what you're trying to do before moving it out of the lab". -r